sarah in nyc

 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 I am trying to get a post in before candle lighting. It's snowing! Not enough for a snowball fight or to build a snowman but enough to make the air quieter. There has been so little snow for the past couple of years that this is enough to bring me a little bit of snow joy. When I helped Laura deal with the textiles in her late mother's apartment a few weeks back, she encourage me to take a light blue linen tablecloth. I was a little reluctant to take it it was a sweet pale blue probably from the late 1950s or 60's. There was no fancy embroidery. It was exactly the sort of cloth my mother would have owned, complete with narrow white pearl stitching at the hem. Unfortunately though, there were also some tears near one end. I had washed and dried the cloth and it was taking up lots of space in my needs to be ironed pile. I realized that if i actually fixed the cloth it would have a home among my tablecloths. I cut off the section of the cloth that was damaged and ran th...

 

 At some point when my older son was in middle school, he is thirty two now, you do the math, I bought him some Arizona jeans. I no longer remember the price.  He wore them until he outgrew them. My younger son then inherited them.  My younger son has been wearing those jeans for at least fifteen years.  Every once in a while my son brings me those jeans to mend. I can't count how many times I have mended them. A few weeks back my son brought them to be mended again. The thighs were so worn out they resembled gauze.  I reinforced the thighs from the wrong side. I added a piece of linen to the inside of each pant leg and then stitched the new fabric to the fragile denim. That ought to  buy another year or so of wear.  I used yarn  to graft the linen inside of the pant leg to the denim. I used machine stitching on the other leg to do the same task. The knee blow outs took place in the past I have reinforced the  top of the waistband with variou...

 One of the lovely things that took place this year is that my delightful cousin moved a couple of blocks away.  She is in the process of moving, luckily for me a couple of blocks in the other direction fromour apartment. Moving requires one to winnow down your STUFF to a more manageable amount. My cousin no longer needed the offcuts of fabrics from the dress that she had worn for her brother's wedding. She dropped it off  at my apartment. Not only did my cousin give me this wonderful embellished chiffon, the matching underlayers, two different organzas and a netting were included as well. My great niece has a birthday in early January. She is the sort of girl who loves all things sparkly. Like my own daughter at the same age, dress up is an important part of her life. I thought that I could turn the offcuts into a skirt for my great niece. I actually looked through my many sewing books to see if I had an appropriate pattern . I did not.  I did find an excellent meas...