sarah in nyc

 Yesterday, the tallit that I was mending got picked up. All of the bits that get touched in normal wear  just got worn out. I backed the edges near the atara with silk chiffon and just stitched and stitched away with silk thread. One sees this kind of work on really old garments from the early 20th century. The fabric was just too fragile to stitch by machine. hopefully I have strengthened the material enough so the tallit can be cleaned and then worn  for the big family event coming up in a couple of weeks. Yesterday  we went on a little adventure to  Little Island . It is an island constructed on a series of plant like cement pods on stems planted into the Hudson River. from outside of the island it looks like a completely artificial man made folly. While on the island it feels like a series of sloping bits of wildlife. It's both very beautiful and really silly. There is an amphitheater space within Little island and some dancers were rehearsing. While we wat...

 My 1930s sewing books will often talk about wash dresses, that is, dresses that are easy to launder and iron up without too much fuss. A garment that can be ironed flat without worrying about pesky ruffles or pleats is to be praised. recently, I made two skirts that one might think of as wash skirts. A friend just gave me a treasure stove of fabric that had belonged to a seamstress. in the huge plastic bins there are some uncut lengths of both home dec and garment making fabrics as well as a few offcuts left over from sewing project.  One of these gems was a strip of fabric that was about 20 inches wide and just under two yards long and made out a a lovely dark indigo blue cotton. I thought it would make a good wrap skirt. The fabric wrapped one and a half times around my hips. I added a few darts along the top edge.(Those are the triangles at the top of the drawing above.) I placed the darts where I thought would be on either side of the CF and CB.I added two ties made out o...

  I made this rye bread. It was delicious and looked cute too. I added some cocoa t about 1/5th of the dough. I rolled the plain dough into a rectangle and the cocoa dough into a  messy rectangle, stacked the two and rolled them up. My husband who hasn't eaten bread with butter in years toasts the bread spreads it with butter and is very happy. I helped plant these earlier in the spring. Last weekend we saw some turkeys wandering around the cabin we are renting . I began work on a pillbox style kippah for a friend. You can see how I build up the design bit by bit. This vintage Swiss embroidered ribbon just came into my life. It's getting there... Now I need to start construction. A day or so ago I went downstairs to check the mail and I was go smacked by the light and the pretty shadows. Shabbat Shalom !

 Any of you who are familiar with Where the Wild Things Are  will be familiar with the phrase  In and out of weeks and through a year, that described Max's adventure in the land of the wild things. Nini sent me the key photos from her last summer's trip to Nova Scotia just about a year ago. I began by looking and looking at these photos and trying to figure out how to render this particular landscape in fabric.   While sometimes Nova Scotia has bright sunny skies.  So often, it is the fog that defines the place. I remembered walking with my Halifax born friend Shawna on a misty day towards the Hudson River.  It was a misty cool day. We were essentially walking through the fog. Shawna sighed and said, "Ahh, it's Halifax weather!".   The fabric for the main body of the tallit was chosen because it evokes the fog. I added more fog with oil paint sticks and with hand embroidery. This photo inspired the stripe of pines above the fog. Nini wanted to be ...