Problem Solving and the Country House

 I am nearly done mending Judith's tallit.

 I love that three weak materials (the worn tallit, the netting and the rayon embroidery threads) together are strong. You need to forgive the photos. My camera is having trouble reading the colors properly.

Anyway with the mending essentially out of the way it is now time to construct the new tallit. 

My regular readers know that i am self taught as a sewer. What that means is that my skills have improved a great deal over the more than thirty years that I have been making Judaica.  I was smart enough to mostly use the limited skills that I had well.

I looked at Judith's tallit again to look at how I had constructed it.

One of the things that I love about this tallit (please ignore the neon pink it really is a lovely rich magenta) is how despite being pieced it flows and drapes as if it was made out of one length of fabric. the longer I looked at the tallit the less sure I was of how I actually achieved that.

After a whole lot of looking carefully at the tallit and sleeping on the problemi realized that I had constructed each stripe unit so it read as interesting from both wrong and right side ( there was some stipe piecing on the wrong side) I embroidered over the raw edges rather than hemming them. The result is flowy.  I am still trying to decode if  the new tallit can be constructed in the same way. The noil that I used in the original tallit has much smaller fibers than the silk tussah. I suspect that the tussah is more likely to shred if the raw edges aren't hemmed. I just figured that out as I was typing those words.

The other thing that I have been trying to puzzle out is how to make the colors that Judith chose play together a bit better.

What worked on the computer screen didn't work that great in real life.

I dyed some white silk to act as a visual bridge.

This was closer but still not exactly right.  After checking with Judith I block printed the dark olive green with a slightly metallic version of the lightest green. This means that the darkest and lightest greens work much better together.

I have two new clients  both of whom need me to make an atara and pinot for  their tallitot that were woven by the same master weaver. I will be writing more about both adventures in the near future.

On the baking front I made this bread a refrigerator risen dough.

I got a bit fancy with the crust slashing. I got fancy with the inside as well. I separated out some of the dough and kneaded in a few tablespoons of cocoa. I rolled out each of the doughs into a rectangle stacked the two and then rolled them up together.

Before you get too impressed---I need to show you the other side of the loaf.

It kind of exploded, Womp! womp! It did taste good though.

 I had thought that tonight we would be feeding three but now we are feeding six. So we have chicken.

I made it with lots of fresh lemon, lime dill and black pepper.

Chicken soup- with drop noodles that look like styrofoam in the photo.  This soup was a practice run for passover so there was lots of soup straining and squeezing all of the souply goodness out of  the soup solids ( bones and vegetables).

I made a quinoa salad. More goodies will go in closer to serving. Toasting quinoa after cooking it is a game changer (on a baking sheet in a medium oven with olive oil and spices until much of the quinoa is crispy).

I also made a custard that will be served with fresh berries.

If the custard solidifies it will be a bowl of custard topped with berries. If it remains liquid I am serving fresh berries with custard sauce. Pretty serving bowls and a sterling ladle will mask the potential failure.

And now I will let you in on a family story that always makes us laugh. When our daughter turned five she received one of those adorable kits that fancy toy shops sell. This kit was for a fairy garden, that is, a wide pottery bowl, soil, some herb seeds and a pretty little house made out of birch bark and some rocks to create a path.

We planted the seeds. My daughter set up the house and created a path. Our apartment is dark, and if  the seeds sprouted then soon died from lack of sunshine. We used to call the little birch bark house our country house.   Eventually, after much too much time we got rid of the bowl full of dirt and the little house.

Around that time we got a storage locker on 125th Street.

The storage facility was in the last building on the block from this tax photo from 1929. The block looked not all that different in the mid 1990s.

Anyway, we started calling our storage locker our country house. "Lets go to the country house and put some outgrown clothes there."  There were times we put stuff into the country house and times we took stuff out of the country house. We have friends with actual country houses with things like lawns or swimming pools but we had our country house on 125th Street.

Anyway,  my daughter was in second or third grade and was attending the school where no one had any sense of humor at all. One Monday my daughter's teacher asked the students what they had done over the weekend. My daughter's classmates talked about visiting grandparents or soccer games or birthday parties or whatever.  My daughter piped up, "We visited our country house." Her teacher asked where our country house was.  My daughter replied, "On 125th Street." My daughter watched her teacher's confused expression. " My daughter continued, "It's our storage locker. We just call it the country house."

I love imagining the thought balloon above that teacher's head when the image in her head of the country house morphs from a pretty place out in the country, to maybe that pretty house on 125th Street, to a storage locker.

Unfortunately that country house/storage locker was knocked down. There is a new shiny building on that spot. We have a new country house on 135th street and another one in Queens.

This is technically a Purim drinking song. I had an excellent Hebrew Literature  teacher during my senior year who taught us this first as a poem and finally as a song. This has been my ear worm most of the week.

Once we reach Peach we won't be adding the prayer for rain to our services.

Shabbat Shalom!