A blog, mostly about my work making Jewish ritual objects, but with detours into garment making, living in New York City, cooking, and other aspects of domestic life.
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The Last Gasp of Autumn
For a little while, it had seemed like autumn would just last forever.
Over the past week or so fewer and fewer leave have been hanging on to the trees.
The low sun in the afternoon sky glowing through the leaves is just a joy.
But since I took those photos last week, it has turned into winter.
I cleaned the wax off of all of the Chanukiyot and put them all away until next year.
Our table will be filled this Shabbat. We are feeding our guests the contents of our crock pot.
I am not including a photo of the pinkie finger that I sliced in the making of dinner, nor a photo of my husband who hates the sight of blood bandaging me up.
We are now passing through to the other side of the darkest part of the year.
In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today. Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things. When we were at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
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