sarah in nyc

 Today has been a rush of a variety of tasks. I made a roast. This is a shoulder roast.  I coated it in a variety of spices and cooked it until it smelled done. I added boiling water to the pan drippings and then added other goodies ( fresh thyme, dried mushroom and good old Manishewitz wine that is a must for charoset and kind of useless as drinking wine). I carefully scraped up all of the dried up good stuff and turned the mixture into a gravy that will be served with the meat. We are a bit container shy during Passover and there was a bit too much gravy to fit in the one container we had left , so I boiled red potatoes in water to which I added that last bit of gravy, the dried mushrooms and the thyme stems.  Covid had meant that not very many people visited so I had allowed bits of our couch to get shabby. I had been meaning to replace the cover on the center cushion on our couch for the last long time. I pulled down a few of my upholstery fabrics and made a new cushi...

 When I have a big project to do (like Max's tallit) it often really helps my focus to have little side projects going at the same time. If I don't work on the little side projects than when I run into a problem with my main project I will just spin my wheels, feel guilty about wasting time and worry about the problem that has cropped up in the process of working. I devote this post to four such small side projects. Side project #1 A while back I had purchased two coordinating striped shirtings from  Fabric Mart Fabrics  planning to make two sets of pillowcases out of the fabrics. When the cotton arrived I was delighted to see that they were both the same really high-quality cotton shirtings that are as smooth as silk and wash like a dream. I don't know which shirt manufacturer had sold leftovers to Fabric Mart but clearly, it was from the sort of shirt maker that charges big bucks for their wares. I made two pillowcases using the narrow stripe for the body of the pillowc...

Despite not having posted in several days, it doesn't mean that I haven't been busy. I re-covered a set of dining room chairs for  my dear friend known in this family as Tanta Marcia. The  Queen Anne dining set had come into Marcia's life through marriage. I had to marry the traditional style of the dining chairs with the contemporary couch and the rustic Oriental rugs and get all of the colors in the room to play nicely. A couple of weeks ago I helped Marcia select the fabric from one of my favorite internet home-dec retailers ( fancy stuff at cheap prices!!!). I do admit that I was a little bit bossy but clearly this was a good choice for the room.   I came over after dinner earlier in the week armed with my fabric shears, a screwdriver and my staple gun. By the end of the evening all of the chairs were covered.  (Ignore the passive voice, I covered all of the chairs)  I have also been working away on the sparks of divine light tallit. Once ...

We are heading into exciting times for my family. My oldest is getting married this spring. Each of my sisters is expecting a grandchild this winter. I will soon be a great-aunt. In anticipating these births I have been assembling gifts for each of these anticipated arrivals. Fabric Mart , as it does so often, helped me out by putting delicious fabrics on sale. I purchased pre-cut lengths of flannel, as well as turquoise medallion print, I could not resist because the print name was my daughter's first name and was even spelled the same way we spell her name. When the fabrics arrived I was delighted. Often the flannel available for home sewers is "boardy". It feels like a fuzzy sheet of cardboard. Boardy flannel is not something one wants near a baby's skin. The flannel that arrived was thick and incredibly soft. I decided to make receiving blankets. They get tons of use from swaddling a newborn to serving as a clean surface when you put your baby down on t...

We bought this pretty little side chair from a country auction house on our way back from dropping our son at summer camp several summers back. The wicker seat soon needed to be replaced. A couple of years ago in a burst of pre-Passover energy, I attempted to re-cane the chair. While doing the re-caning I soon realized why it is so expensive to have chairs re-caned. my not terribly good job began to fall apart. Amazon.com Widgets A recent sleepless night yielded a solution to the problem of what to do about the pretty little chair. I am now the owner of lots of spools of ribbon. I decided to weave a new seat out of ribbon. It was a few hours of work, but it was far less hard on the hands than the cane. The ribbon does not have to be soaked in warm water to become flexible. I was trying to figure out where I had gotten the idea of using ribbon to weave a seat and I guess it must be Shaker chairs.  I was so inspired by my success that I decided to try my hand o...

Our shower curtain had seen better days, lots of better days. It had actually gotten sort of disgraceful.   I have been on the lookout for replacement fabric. The other day I thought that I might approach this problem of a needing a new shower curtain like a regular American and just go buy one.   I went shopping. The shower curtains I found in the two stores I visited just looked depressed to me. If I didn’t hate them so much I might have bought the two that we needed. I am very aware when I make something for the household, as opposed to making a garment for myself , that I have to think not just about what I like but what the people who live with me would like as well. It just isn’t fair to have something frilly if I share my house with my sons and my husband.   Fabric Mart had black and white seersucker gingham on clearance. Seersucker can be awfully sweet, but the black and white  saves it from being too adorable.   I ordered six yards of...