A Mending Job Complete and an Out of Town Jaunt

 For reasons that I don't understand, the work that I do comes in waves. there were years when most of my work was making chuppot, wedding canpopies. Other years are filled with making nothing but challah covers or tallitot. This has been a year of mending.  There have been many, many mending projects that I have worked on over the past several months. 

Several months ago my shul buddy Chris asked me if I would take on the task of mending his wedding tallit.  Chris and his wife are celebrating a big anniversary later this month. I love that Chris loves his wife so much, loves his marriage so much that it really mattered to him that his wedding tallit be fixed.

The tallit was made by a sweet woman who was sort of a wild and wooly craft person. She painted Chris's tallit on China silk. China silk is a very pretty, inexpensive and fragile silk that shreds if  you sneeze.  Making a tallit out of China silk (this isn't just silk woven in China but a type of silk) is the equivalent of building an apartment house out of balsa wood. It might look good for a little while but it just isn't going to last.

 I fused the shredding tallit to lightweight fusible interfacing and then hand stitched all of the breaks in the silk.

Many of the gold lines on the tallit had begun to chew up the silk so I embroidered or couched gold threads over the failed gold lines. You can see my stitching as a shimmer on the tallit.

From a tiny distance my work isn't even particularly noticeable. I backed the tallit with silk twill.

I put in more than thirty hours of work into the repair of this tallit.

There are times when your job is to be unnoticeable. That was my task here.

I had been hoping to do a bit more posting over the past couple of weeks---so I am doing some make up posting now.

We went away, to Wilmington Vermont and to Franconia, New Hampshire.  We chose Wilmington because it was near where we were going. My husband had me choose a place to spend the night. I looked at the list of accommodations and as usual we started out by looking at the least expensive places first. I thought that I had chosen a 1960s  motel with a country-looking façade.  I was wrong.

We were staying upstairs in an old mill that brews their own beer and makes their own fabulous pizza. Yes, our room overlooked the river.

The rooms are pretty simple.

The town is adorable.

There are people who pre-plan every moment of a trip. We are wanderers. We are fine with less than stellar meals and unlovely motel rooms. Wilmington was extra wonderful for the complete unexpectedness of it's charm.

We then spent Shabbat with our dear friends who had rented a ski house for the week. We loved spending time with our friends. I didn't take photos of the view from the back porch of layers and layers of mountains./

We decided to make our way home through our old New Hampshire haunts in the lake country.

Our brother in law was out for a hike but we stopped by the house and I took theses photos from his porch.

Our brother in law lent us his house so often over the years. We spent so much time here with our kids. This view triggers years of lovely memories. I keep a photo of this view behind my dishes. I look at that photo every morning when I take out my coffee cup.

We picked up bread and cheese and something to drink in Center Harbor and drove to Meredith to eat lunch by Lake Winnipesaukee.

We spent a night in Boston and then stopped at an antique mall in Stratford, CT

on the way home. The antique mall is next door to this motel that looks like it lives up to it's name.

I did not buy this coronation plate of the very constipated looking Edward VII who chose to abdicate. 

I didn't buy these Liberty blue dishes. I already own six. I bought them when I was a college junior. I didn't own dinner plates. The Waltham Supermarket offered them for .50 with each five dollar purchase and I purchased $30 worth of groceries. I am always amused when I find them at an antique store. 

I remember that one of my classmates had this lunch-box.

I hadn't realized that Space Cadet was the name of a TV show and not just an insult.

The jacket was home made from Lily Pulitzer fabric. I think that it makes sense only in New England or in Florida. It made me feel very nostalgic.

Finally there was one thing that I did purchase.  

When we would visit my aunt in her wonderful old Brooklyn home my sisters and I used to play in the magical playroom in the attic of the house. the room was filled with toys that my older cousins used to play with when they were our age. Occasionally my aunt would let us take home one of those treasures. We inherited a set of white plastic building blocks--similar to but not Legos that had red plastic doors and windows that you could fit into the white plastic houses that we built.

My aunt once let me take home a real treasure, a dollhouse sized silver tea set. I spent hours playing with that pretty little tea-set. When my cousin had a daughter my mother gave her the tea set. I was an adult. I knew that my mother did the right thing. I still missed that pretty little tea set.

The antique mall had that beloved tea set.

My set from childhood didn't have the tray, but did have tea cups, saucers and little ice cream bowls. This little doll house tea set is now sitting next to my full sized tea set. For ten bucks all is right in my world.