sarah in nyc

I probably wore this embroidered blouse every year on Israel Independence Day between seventh and twelfth grade. Most of the girls in my school wore a variation of this blouse to celebrate Israel's birthday.  At school we would have had an assembly complete with lots of songs from the time of Israel’s birth. We may have watched a movie some years.  Certainly part of the celebrations included Israeli dancing and eating felafel in pita. The blouse was worn to express my solidarity with Israel. My blouse came from an older sort of cousin. I believe that this particular blouse is from the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. The fitted nature of the blouse, it’s short length, meant to hit just at the waist, and the zipper in the side seam all seem to date it to that time period. The embroidery is fairy fine. Similar blouses that were new during my high school years, the 1970’s, were made with much larger, cruder stitches. By the 1980’s similar shirts were made with machine embroidery ...

When my mother was young she used to embroider. She used to embroider challah covers. It used to be possible to buy embroidery designs printed on linen, like the one pictured above, in Jewish book stores. The design is a standard one. You have all of the symbols for Shabbat, candles, challah, wine cup and decanter. the text reads “ In honor of Shabbat and Holidays”. If I remember correctly, my mother started this challah cover while she was in college and living with her older sister in Brooklyn.  I guess life got in the way of finishing this challah cover and it got put away.  My mother taught my older sister how to embroider when she was about 12. My sister  started out working from kits and then progressed to do some really elaborate work. At some point during her embroidery career she put some work into this challah cover. The Passover when I was 7, my mother gave me a Jewish embroidery set as an afikoman present. The kit came with a challah cover and a matza ...

Maya's tallit requires a fair amount of hand work. One side of the tallit is ocean-ey. the other is cosmos/sky. Maya had dyed the silk for the tallit, green on one side and blue on the other.I had been stitching away on the ocean, and the cosmos was pretty empty. Since  what I am depicting is cosmos, deep space, I lke to have that sense of looking deep into the infinity.  One of the ways to do that, is to layer  the stars and other glittery business. If I were a different sort of a girl I would have planned out each stitch and each bead before I started. But I am not that sort of a girl. I like to have the piece evolve as I work. I could pretend that I need to work that way for some deep artistic reason and put that in my mission statement.  Honestly though if I were simply following a pattern, I would be too bored to work. So riffing on cosmos is the way for me to go. What you are looking at is a mix of machine stitching, hand stitching, beading and se...