The theme of the day is color

My friend Racheley lived in Boston between fifth and seventh grade while her father was getting a graduate degree. Bother of her parents taught in my school and we became close during those years. After Racheley and her family returned to Israel we lost touch. We may have exchanged a few aerogrammes but perhaps not.

Racheley and I reconnected on Facebook a few years ago, and we got to visit in person in 2018. We have reconnected as if there wasn't a break of decades. The one thing that Racheley has mentioned missing is the color of New England autumn. I totally understand that longing for the deep reds and oranges of the leaves in the Boston fall. Living in Manhattan there are years when my eyes don't get enough fall foliage. each year that happens it feels like a loss. I NEED that color the same way that a body NEEDS enough vitamin C to survive.

So for the past several years, every autumn I search out color to send to Racheley.

This past Sunday, our friends Alfie and Judy suggested an outing to The New Croton Dam.

This place looks like it was built only tangentially for the gorgeous engineering but primarily as an inspiration for artists.

My husband took this beautiful photo of the spiderweb along the dam walkway.

Almost as spectacular as the dam, was the foliage.

We then drove to the Hudson River.

As soon as I got home, I sent Racheley photos so she could experience the autumn color with me.

I also thought about intensity of color as I finished off Jerry's atara and began taking photos of the finished piece sewn back in place on his tallit.

The intense orange does exactly the same thing to my eyes as the fall foliage.

I have restored pieces that were made by others. One lovely thing about restoring a piece I had made long ago is that I know what my intention was when i first made the piece. So even though I was using different materials and different colors and different techniques I was able to deliver the same visual message as i was thirty years ago.

Using multiple colors of gossamer thin embroidery thread creates the same iridescence as the metallic and silk organza that I had used thirty years ago.

My dear downstairs neighbor, Judith, an artist and designer, once said to me that colors don't need to match, they need to rhyme. I feel that I have been able to make my restorations on Jerry's atara rhyme with the original.

My husband looked at the center gold section as I was working on the repair and commented that I must be so happy that I found some of the original bright copper and silk organza.

I hadn't. What I did was layer orange silk organza over the original metallic fabric which I had topped with gold embroidery to stabilize it.

It wasn't the same fabric but it reads as the same thing. If I knew more technically about color theory and optics I could explain exactly what I did to you and explain exactly why it works. I can't explain the science but I do know how to create the visual effect I want.

I will be really happy to see Jerry wearing his newly restored atara in synagogue.

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

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