sarah in nyc

 It's Friday, but I won't be posting about food. I have the sinus Yucks once again. Luckily I had cooked too much shabbat dinner on previous weeks so I just pulled chicken and challah out of the freezer and they are warming up in the oven as I type. Despite feeling crummy I have actually gotten chunks of work done this week. Accompanying me in my work has been an excellent podcast,  Sew What . Any of my readers who are textile junkies will enjoy it. Wednesday I baked a bread. I had left a bit of dough from a batch I had baked last week in a bowl in the fridge.That old dough served as the starter for this loaf. I included some fine bulgur wheat in the dough. Before baking the bread I dampened the loaf with water, sprinkled flour over the dough and then scored the loaf. It tasted as good as it looks. I began working on Judith's atara. I started with some block printing on the silk. Then I drafted the letters on some cardstock with a square tipped paint brush. I had made the l...

 The meals were eaten. The shofar was blown and now it is time to squeeze in as much work as I can before we leave for Israel to visit our son--right after Yom Kippur. A few weeks ago I met with a new client. Bonnie grew up on the coast of southern Massachusetts and now lives just north of Boston on the sea. Bonnie is the daughter of someone who ran a textile mill so fabric is in her bones.  When we met she realized that she wanted the stripes on the tallit to look like the ocean of her childhood home. While the body of Bonnie's tallit would be made out of a lovely raw silk, the stripes would be painted on a smooth faced silk. I felt fortunate when I found a length of super heavyweight silk charmeuse that was left over from a tallit I had made a while back. Before I began painting, I spent a long, long time looking at images of the ocean off the coast of southern Massachusetts, actually the beach I went to most often as a child. When the colors were set in my head I got to wor...

I made this dress this afternoon. The lace began life as my living room curtain about twenty years ago. The curtain was a really early sewing project for me. It was one of a pair. I was always fond of the fabric. I have been noticing lots of lace dresses made with brightly contrasting linings. OK so that was the genesis of the idea. I also have a huge fabric stash. Sometimes it feels good just to use some of it up. I started by copying a basic dress.   The shape  of the dress was this. The lace had a finished selvedge edge. it would be silly to not use such a pretty hem as the dress hem. That finished hem meant that it made more sense to cut the dress with a straighter shape. more like this:   I cut the lace to the dress shape and a piece of hot pink Swiss dot cotton for the lining to the right shape. I sewed the lining to the lace.The starting dress was a knit. Everyone who knows anything about sewing knows that a dress with no stretch has to be cut b...

Walking around Manhattan I have been seeing lots of the simple sorts of summer dresses that I (and the rest of the world) wore in the 1970’s. The 1970’s was a great decade for DIY. Aside from the The Whole Earth Catalog , and Simple Living   which were generalist books that taught skills from simple plumbing to how to build a mulch pile along with  diagrams and patterns for simple clothing, there were also more specialized books with lots of directions for garment making. Some of the books came from  mainstream sources, like Time Life Sewing .  ( This is actually an excellent series both from a fashion history perspective as well as being really good at teaching skills. The material books are organized in a slightly daffy way though. It isn’t always easy to find exactly what you are looking for. It’s usually easy to find single volumes   on ebay or Amazon. Sometimes you can find the complete set or most of a complete set for not too much money) I h...