A Whole Lot of Catching Up With My Dear Readers

 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 that bit  and stitch it onto the tallit---easy peasy!

Unfortunately the strip is about six inches too narrow to use as a graceful atara.This was a problem that was keeping me up at night.  As I tossed and turned I tried to figure out an elegant way to add the required inch-age to the woven strip.

I cut the additional thinner stripes on the bias and pieced them together. That was starting to get somewhere.

I thought about Judaica imported from Israel in the late 1960s and early 1970s that were embellished with couched embroidery.

So I got to work doing my take on that sort of handwork.

This is what it looked like a couple of days ago....

And this is what it looks like now.

I think that this works. One of the great things about this technique is that it is fairly quick and packs a punch. I am hoping to complete this tallit in the next couple of days.

Other stuff has taken place as well while I was off line. My husband got me a new computer for my birthday! I am using it right now...well  except for the keyboard which had a P problem. If I typed the letter P nothing would appear on my screen. An hour or so later when I tried to type anything I would get hundreds of P's spitting themselves out until they had had enough. We have reinstalled our old keyboard that is starting to look like those blank keyboards they used to use in typing classes eons ago because the letters have just worn away. My husband did the horrible job of calling the folks who needed to be called and a new keyboard should arrive eventually.

We celebrated Mothers Day /my birthday with our kids. Like many family adventures where we either can't find our actual destination or hate the cool place we were planning to go to and end up doing something else which is fabulous....

We were supposed to go to a cool food court/craft show in Dumbo but we found it oppressive ( it was just too loud and the crafts were mediocre)  so instead we went to Grimaldi's for pizza. Grimaldi's has coal fired ovens and famously thin crusted pizza. The pizza was indeed wonderful but the star of the meal was their arugula and lemon salad. I would go back to Grimaldi's just for that salad.

After lunch we all walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. When we had left our house to get to Brooklyn it was raining and dreary. But the day cleared to being picture postcard perfect.

I think that the rain earlier in the day kept the crush of tourists mostly away. Often walking across the Brooklyn Bridge feels like navigating the subway during rush-hour.

Last Sunday was also a bit of a small city adventure day.  I had won a lot at an online estate auction and had to go pick it up in Stuyvesant Town. My husband joined me and after the successful pick up we wandered into Union Square Park.

I had worked just south of the park in the mid 1980s and it was not a place where one wanted to spend time unless you were looking to buy drugs or purchase some other vice. It is now a hub of cool.

Every Sunday there are vendors selling a mix of cute junk, art and crafts.  I had asked but was denied permission to take photos of one artist. He made African influenced cubist collages. His work is really wonderful. I completely understand why he didn't want people taking photos of his work---that's why I ask first. But make sure to look for him when you go to Union Square .

Another artist asked for donations if you took photos of her work.

She makes felt sculptures of New York city pests, pigeons, rats and racoons.

If you look carefully you can see an actual pigeon wandering among the stuffed ones. You can see the artist in her ruffled skirt.

Later in the day we met our buddies Alfie and Judy and drove to Astoria to visit the Socrates Sculpture park which is a park created in a reclaimed waterfront industrial area---there is a Costco next door.  There are periodic sculpture installations.

The current exhibit is made up of strips of sari fabric woven through rope net and attached to these forms

Aside from the sculptures, the park itself is a wonderful garden next to the East River. The entire park feels very homespun and informal-- less like a visit to a city park but more like a visit to the garden of a delightful eccentric aunt.

There is so much in New York that is expensive or feels like you need to be on some sort of a special A list to get in. The Socrates Sculpture Garden is free, easy to get to and a magical place to spend an afternoon.

And on a completely unrelated topic...

I  was making a batch of lazy pita the other day using some loose dough that had been hanging out in the fridge for a few days. I had made a few batches of pita out of this batch of dough. I had added yeast to the first batch of the dough and just added more flour and water, oil salt and sweetner to the dough as most of it got used up...so no new yeast  just lazy fermenting in the fridge.

My husband had bought some beautiful tomatoes at the fruit cart. The tomatoes were sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter.

I mushed the wet blobs of dough into pita-like shapes on a baking sheet and looked at the tomatoes. I topped each dough blob with a bit of olive oil. Sliced up a couple of tomatoes as thin as I could and sprinkled some spices on top. I think that I see sumac and smoked paprika. There was also probably some black pepper and cayenne.

It was a kind of proto-pizza. it was so simple, and so good. It elevated a dinner of leftovers into something wonderful.

So there you go---we are pretty much caught up.