sarah in nyc

 As I type this post Madeline's tallit should be in her hands.  Before I shipped it off i took better photos of the tallit so you have a better sense of what I have done to compliment the beautiful work of the weaver who created the base tallit. I finished off the extra bits of the Atara wit couched lunettes. I like how the scalloped embroidery on the ribbon echoes that shape. Madeline's mother told me that her daughter's friend was able to identify all of the animal footprints on the Pinot. I am grateful to Google Images  that allows me to find exactly what I need. In a couple of days I will be tying the tzitzit with Madeline.   I have loved my conversations with Madeline and I have also loved my conversation in textiles with Susan the weaver of the tallit itself. Susan and I have exchanged a couple of texts but working so closely with her beautiful weaving I feel like we have had several long and meaningful conversations. As for Shabbat dinner. I could have sw...

  I start this post with two food items. This isn't technically Food Friday because  neither are being served for Shabbat dinner.  I pulled yet another chicken that I had cooked for Passover out of the freezer but I have gussied it up with gochujang and molasses.I only did the fancying up because our son is joining us. I could serve the same meal to my husband for months at a time and he would be fine with it. My son though, loves food and likes a bit of variety so a bit of extra flavor. I roasted some pepper strips and will be serving them with blanched asparagus. The colors are pretty together --and blueberries for dessert. I made this red pepper, artichoke and cheese flatbread to bring to a potluck dinner this weekend. I am showing this bread just because it is pretty.  I  kneaded some cocoa into part of the bread flour and used my nifty silicone mate to roll our the coco-ed dough into a rectangle. i then rolled out the rest of the dough and rolled  the ...

 I know, it has been a while so here is the recap of what I have neglected to write about.  Most importantly, there has been progress on Madeline's tallit. I embroidered ribbon to frame each of the pinot/  corner pieces. The point of this activity was to create the mix of colors that Susan, the master weaver had used in the tallit. The incredible thing about Susan's work is that while you can see all of the various colors when you look at the tallit up close, the purple, lavender, sage green and dark green and the various shades of blue--from a distance it reads as sky blue. Yup, Susan is brilliant. Anyway, you can see how  my work is having a really pleasant conversation with Susan's but in a different medium. My next issue was how to create the atara/ neckband . Susan had included a test sample of the the stripes on the tallit. It's narrower than the finished tallit and used the same colors and a variant of the stripe pattern. It a perfect world I would just edge t...

 First order of business: A photo of Madeline's pinot---complete with many little cotton threads from the cotton batiste thaty I haven't fully cleaned up. Yes, I have to go to work with some masking tape to pick away all of the white threads. I'm still figuring out how to edge the pinot. The wheels are turning although the actual solution is not yet quite figured out. I haven't baked challah in about two months. When I started this batch I wondered if I would still remember what to do. I did remember. About half of these challot are stuffed with apple butter and apple friendly spices. The other half are not because I ran out of patience. We are eating one of the chickens that I had made before Passover. Our dining room is still  piled high with STUFF because of the flood last week in our maid's room. We have been running a dehumidifier. I have occasionally turned it off for half a day but then we get the basement smell again, so back on it goes. Some buildings in my...