Clothes Worn by Me, and Garments Made as Gifts

There are some blogs devoted to what the blog owner is wearing that day. If you have spent any time here on this blog you will know that this is something that I rarely do. However...

There has been a meme going around the internet which is basically "Tell me that you are from____ without saying that you are from _____". So, this leads me to the following.

It has gotten nippy out. I put on a wool knee length pencil skirt that I had made a few years ago because I had fallen deeply in love with the fabric. I had to go out so I put on my warmest sweater which is a Dale of Norway.

So now, this is the answer to, "Tell me you are from New England without telling me that you are from New England."

The great thing about the Dale of Norway sweater is because of the floats of yard on the underside of the knit you are essentially wearing two sweaters, I was fortunate to find the sweater in my local thrift.

A sewing friend once described my style of dressing myself as Anthropology Professor. I see this outfit as New England Arty Anthropology Professor.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been making clothing to give as Chanukah gifts to some of my young relatives. I am not quite done yet but I will show you what I have done so far.

I had purchased this wonderfully wild fabric thinking that my great niece would want me to make her a dress out of it.

The fabric was manufactured for making gymnastics uniforms. My great niece was smitten with the fabric as was her little brother. I had enough fabric to make two dresses for two little girl relatives and one pair of pants.

The three garments together

The littlest of the dresses

I also made dresses for another batch of young ones.

These three are made out of super comfortable, easy to launder scuba knit. Clearly I had enough of the black and orange floral stripe for two dresses. Someone gave me the bright orange ric rack years ago. The rick rack keeps the dresses fun for a little girl to wear.The black and white harlequin print had buttons that I covered with bits of the floral print so the three sisters can look like they belong together.

I shipped the black and orange dresses today at the post office. The sun sets so early these days. When I left the post office the most mundane buildings in the neighborhood were dressed in the glow of the soon to be setting sun and actually looked interesting in the golden light.

The building below has one of the best rooflines in the neighborhood but it looks extra wonderful in the late afternoon light.

The moon rises below the water towers.

I have some more gifts to make for more young relatives and I have my actual work to tackle.

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born, Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...

Two funerals and a birthday

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...

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog