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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Mostly, but not all music
This Shabbat our food is all provided from the depths of my freezer ( beef stew, chicken soup challah and frozen vegetables) so there won't be much about food.
My older son has been using our kitchen to cook the meal that he is bringing to a potluck Shabbat dinner tonight. It feels like the old days.The kitchen smells great but not through my efforts.
Since we are heading into cold and flu season I thought that you may enjoy hearing this Yiddish song. We sang this a whole lot when my kids were little.
Another appropriate for the season Yiddish song.
On the sewing front I have been working away on lining the leather motorcycle jacket. Unlike sewing in fabric, once you sew in leather the needle holes are permanent. If you add a new set of needle holes you have weakened the leather.
I hand stitched a back stitch ( a really strong hand sewing stitch) in strong red crochet cotton ( it was the only color I had on hand)into the existing holes that had held the lining in place.
I am now hand stitching a ready made quilted jacket onto the red stitching. Below you see the neckline sewn into place.
Here is one side mostly sewn into place.
I am planning to leave the zipper of the lining so that the lining can be zipped independently of the outer leather jacket.
Working on this jacket I understand why tailors worked sitting cross legged on the floor. This is a heavy project and it needs to be supported so I don't wreck my wrists.
Soon I will have a warm, lined leather jacket that will take me through a great deal of the winter.
Don't ask me if the number of hours that I have invested in this jacket are actually worth it. I won't answer you.
I end this post with another of those wonderful Israeli secular Shabbat songs that is prayerful but not religious. Someone's doctoral dissertation could be written about Israeli music that evokes religious themes but is secular.
A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...
I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...
My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...
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