Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Terry's tallit

Mostly food---and a bunch of other stuff

 This post is mostly about food. It is about the food I have been making for Rosh Hashanah and the food I have been making for us to eat until then. Earlier in the week I baked bagels. That was a simple mid-week bake. I only used half the dough for bagels. The rest was pulled pulled out of the oven in the form of a cute heart shaped loaf. Yesterday was challah baking day. My husband discovered apple butter this summer and suggested that it would make a yummy and appropriate Rosh Hashanah  stuffing for our challot.  I remembered that I had actually filled challot with apple butter a couple of years ago and it was a bit too wet. so I microwaved some apple butter with tapioca starch (and probably some spices-- I was working too quickly to account for every ingredient in the challah ) to thicken it up. Above is the thickened apple butter and below you see it in use before being rolled up. How many challot did I make? I have no idea. I made several of them small. Three will en...

Pivoting

 Many years ago, I worked with a woman who had an idea about how to embellish t-shirts for women and embellish them and sell them.  My co-worker drew quite beautifully. One afternoon after work she went downtown to find shirts to embellish and she didn't find exactly  the shirt that she had in mind and she never pursued the project any further.  I was completely baffled. I couldn't understand how a slightly different shirt couldn't be used instead of the shirt she had originally envisioned. I have thought of that woman often over the decades and how for her, a small alteration of expectations just completely shut her down. So much of my work is about facing an obstacle and then pivoting---like a Roomba. I was about to start the atara for Terry's tallit. For those of you who have lives outside of reading my blog, here is a photo of Terry's tallit. It is made out of chunks of the tablecloth that Terry's mom embroidered for Terry's 20th birthday.  Terry's m...

Reaching the finish line

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...

Stitched to the Past

 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...