sarah in nyc

This morning Arianna came over to tie her tzitzit. I like to have my clients tie tzitzit in the manner of Rabbeinu Tam. this image comes from https://www.tekhelet.com/tekhelet-tying-tools/tying-tzitzit/  Lots of rabbis put time and effort into variously lovely and meaningful methods of tying tzitzit. I use the tying method on the very left. I like the spiraling ridge that goes around the tzitzit. Many kids of a certain age know this particular knot from making friendship bracelets. It is known in the of friendship bracelet making universe as Chinese staircase. Yes, the use of the word Chinese to indicate something that is not usual isn't really polite but i knew that if I used the term it was a short-hand way for Arianna to know exactly what I expected her to do. Not surprisingly, Arianna knew exactly what i was talking about and she was an expert practitioner. Arianna tied the first corner with one strand of her grandfather's tzitzit that I had dyed blue a long time ago. Yes,...

When I finished typing this post I realized that it actually has a theme---stuff that looks like a disaster while in process and then looks good when completed.  Many of the projects I work on spend much of their time under my hands looking like kind of a mess. There is a large number of small tasks that need to get completed each in the proper order ( or at least what feels like the proper order to me). While that process of  many small tasks is going on  things can look like they may not have a good end. Then, there is a moment when the project goes from looking like DIY gone bad to something quite terrific. This week two pieces made that transformation within hours of one another.  Arianna's tallit --now looks like a tallit. It is complete with the fringes and corner pieced from Grandpa's tallit. I still have to sew on the atara and make the eyelets. I am happy for every inch of the many yards of of machine embroidery that went into this piece. From a distance thi...

 Sometimes I don't even quite realize what a project is REALLY about until I am in the tick of working on it. Take, for example, Arianna's tallit. Arianna was entirely clear about which ribbons from my stash I should use as the stripes on her tallit. As I began to work I thought that this was the major focus of the tallit. But as I worked I kept looking that the remnants of her grandfather's tallit. Arianna was 100% clear that I should use her grandfather's atara and his pinot on her tallit. There is also one strand of tzitzit that I had dyed blue ---each of her brothers had her father each have one of those strands incorporated into their tzitzit. This tallit is all about Arianna being part of her family. I needed to make the atara integrate completely with Arianna's ribbon choices. I purchased a narrow royal blue ribbon so there is a better conversation between Arianna's choices and her grandfather's atara. This is coming together nicely. I am however not ...

 Right now I am working on several projects at once. While visually they are not at all similar each one is about connecting the user to the past.  I grew up in a house that my parents moved into during the summer of 1957. My mother moved out about a year after my father died. People who are better at numbers than I am at numbers say that was fifty-five years in the same house. My friend Frank grew up quite differently. He was born in Burma. Frank's father was an academic and got on the wrong side of the government so Frank went to kindergarten in Rangoon. I no longer remember all of the places Frank and his brother lived during their young lives but clearly, they saw a whole lot more of the world than I did living in Quincy. Frank's parents sucked up the culture wherever they lived. Frank's mom bought fabrics and had clothes made for her bought shoes ( I was lucky enough to briefly own a pair of her brass-heeled embellished high-heeled mules which I passed on to the girl w...