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Showing posts with the label Eliana's tallit

Aliza and Eliana's tallitot, completed

I finally completed the girls' tallitot. Amazon.com Widgets As I may have stated earlier they are twins, the children of thoughtful parents who have since they were born been comfortable treating their daughters like sisters and not like a single unit of human being. They came by yesterday with their parents and a dear family friend to tie their tzitzit. Eliana had mentioned that she had forgotten all of the details of our design meeting but seeing her tallit reminded he of our discussion. She was happy that I had remembered to include all of the things that she had mentioned. Aliza hadn't realized just how much she really liked the verse she had chosen for her atara.  The bags I had made were like the girls, related but not identical. I constructed the ribbon stripe with two widths and colors of ribbon and some machine embroidery. The girls were as impressed as I was with the result.  We then got down to the work of tying the tzit...

Working away

Today I baked bread for the first time since Passover. I felt like there ought to a a b'racha to recite for that first bread baking. There isn't one as far as I know, but i felt grateful to get back to that familiar task. Amazon.com Widgets Perhaps it was the pickled beets I had made to accompany last night's dinner but I thought it would be nice to make pumpernickel bagels. As per my usual way of doing these things, I didn't consult with a cookbook.  I know from extensive cook book  reading that the color in pumpernickel bread comes from chocolate. I added two hefty tablespoons of cocoa to the dough and some caraway seeds. The cocoa changed the texture of the bread dough to sort of resemble Play-do. it wasn't unpleasant, it was just different. Next time I might add a bit less cocoa to the dough. This is definitely something I would do again. I went back to work on Eliana's tallit. her mother had sent along some fabrics to be used in the tall...

The great Passover Olympics have begun

For some reason I don't feel like I can actually start the process of getting my house ready for Passover until I strip the old wax off the kitchen floor. According to halacha/ Jewish law if food is not even up to the standards of a dog, something a dog would not eat then it is OK to keep it around on Passover and it does not count as Chametz. Although we do have someone come weekly to do most of the cleaning around here, I usually feel that this is to gross and difficult a job to give to someone else to do. So every year, i start my preparation for Passover on my hands and knees getting rid of waxy yellow (actually grey) build up on my kitchen floor and think about floor product advertisements from the 1960's, my father talking about ancient Canaanite spring practices of cleaning out dough bowls, Passover long ago,  the connection between the soul cleansing we do at the High Holiday season that is symbolized  by tashlich how there is a similar process of soul cleaning ...