sarah in nyc

  I was asked during Pesach to make a tallit for someone I have known for my entire life. It is a gift and a surprise for the recipient. I was asked if I had any tallitot ready to go in my stash. When I first started doing this work my sewing skills were rudimentary. I used to buy scarf blanks, paint them and create pinot/corner pieces. I slowly stopped doing the ready-to wear tallitot and have only done custom tallitot for the past many years.  I did go through an old box (because the person who made this request is a dear, dear friend) and I found a velvet shawl that I had begun to paint. I added some more color and set all of the dyes. If you had assumed that fabric paint painted on a shawl 15 years ago and not set  is 100% permanent --you would be wrong. We had some discussion back and forth about the right verse s to use on this tallit but further digging in my stash turned up a remnant I had purchased at B+J Fabrics at some point in the 1990s.  It is silk broca...

My beloved nephew is getting married in a few weeks. This is a big deal.  I do own a rotation of black tie optional  appropriate dresses. The good and bad news is that there have been many weddings in our family in the past few years.  My dresses have been danced in at several family events. It was time to make something new. I had spent a fair amount of time virtually shopping with my sister, the mother of the groom. She has chosen a beautiful dress for herself that will exactly suit her body and the occasion. I needed something for me. I found this dress on the Norma Kamali site. It ticked a whole lot of boxes for me. It suits my body. It looks comfortable to dance in. It looks like regular clothes but it is made in a fancy fabric. I don't have to buy any special underpinnings to wear this dress. The price tag did not tick any of my boxes. The dress is also somewhat showier than I want to wear at this event. Several months ago I had purchased  this em...

As I get ready to write this post, I look over the photos I have taken over the past few days. There are times when they seem to organize themselves into a tidy little story. There are other times when  they are the visual equivalents of the  school lunches my mother sometimes made when she was really short on sleep and grocery shopping still needed to get done. My sisters and I would compare the results with a befuddled shrug. I once got a cottage cheese and cranberry sauce sandwich. My mother when asked, said that she knew I liked them both. My sister got a cottage cheese and sauerkraut sandwich for the same reason. Both were  difficult to eat in sandwich form. I think I may have gotten the better of the two sandwiches. So bear with me as you read the rest of this post. I am a bit sleep deprived. We got up early yesterday to observe Aunt Yetta's Yahrzeit.  We both adored my mother-in-law's younger sister. My husband used to say that Yetta in her outlook was ...

Our washing machine has developed a drip. The repairman was scheduled to come today--any time from noon until 5. It's Friday, of course I have nothing else to do!...I agreed to the timing.  Yesterday I got a call from the repairman saying he planned to show up at 1:00. I can do that but I had plans to meet a friend for lunch, Shabbat dinner needed to get cooked . My son is usually a good sport about working around my schedule but he had a commitment.  Amazon.com Widgets My friend was willing to have lunch at home with me but aside from the food I was cooking for Shabbat, the larders were pretty bare. I got up early, got the chicken going, Cleared out all the stuff around the washing machine and got a workout in. I showered and got a load of laundry in the washing machine before the repairman came.  I then got a call from the repairman. He was coming an hour early. Great! but there was a load of wash going in the machine he was supposed to fix. I had adjusted ...

The same way that I keep cooking variations on the same chicken dish, (the same technique just flavored differently). I will often use the same basic dress shape over and over. Amazon.com Widgets This simple shape for an a-line cap sleeved dressis a staple in my wardrobe.  A couple of months a go I did a version that reminded me of a Boston Bruins uniform.  Last week I pulled out a length of dense patterned sweater knit from my stash and there wasn't quite enough for a dress for me. I pieced a strip of a black and white patterned sweater knit to the top edge of the fabric. I then cut the pieced fabric into a dress shape. This is the result.A simple dress that has garnered tons of compliments. It's dead simple but  graphically packs a punch. One of my neighbors complimented me on the dress and suggested that I make several more of them in different fabrics. I think I may have five other dresses cut in exactly the same shape. A length of black floc...

What you see here is a knit pencil skirt with a paisley print. it looks completely simple, a no brainer. The fabric for this skirt came in a Fabric Mart mystery bundle. It was a 3/4 yard length of a print that was bright in two areas of the fabric and faded to dark. There wasn’t enough yardage for a dress. I had some fabrics that I could possibly marry to this one to create a dress. the other complicating factor what the placement of the lighter areas of the print.   I kept the fabric near my sewing machine ad every once in a while would take it out, look at it, wrap the fabric around my body and realize that I still hadn’t figured out what to do. Finally, last week the light bulb went off in my head. If I cut the skirt with the lightest areas front and center (and also at the center back) I could end up with a skirt that didn’t look like it was made by a blind seamstress. The skirt came together quickly after the months of mulling. The solution seems obvious. mayb...