sarah in nyc

A dear friend had a note pad in her apartment that read " the only domestic thing about me is that I live in a house."  It is a pretty funny line. Amazon.com Widgets For most of us who grew up in the 1960's and 70's we saw the teaching of home economics in the schools as a dreadful retrograde tool to keep women out of the marketplace and tied to home. For some perverse reason I have been reading books on the teaching of what used to be called Home Science, Home Economics or Domestic Science since I was in my early teens. I was fortunate that my local library had a pretty good collection if such books in the stacks. I still don't quite understand why I was so drawn to those musty books on child rearing and home care from the earliest years of the 20th century. In my teens I loved seeing how the world depicted in those books seemed so different from my own. What I have come to learn in my reading over the years is that rather than bei...

When I un-picked all of the miles of lace from the edges of Gavi's wedding dress I realized that some of the lace, especially the bits that had been on the bottom hem of the dress had gotten a bit greyish and dingy. It really needed to be clean before I attached the lace to the silk double Georgette. The bit of schmutz might not matter at the back of the hem of a dress but it would be noticeable on a tallit. I can't calculate all of the books of early 20th century helpful home hints I have read since I was in grade school. I am a person of odd passions. I had a period of time when I was little when I had a crush on dump trucks. But I have been reading collections of home hints probably since I was seven or eight ( not long after my dump truck love). Many of these hints are not exactly useful in my every day life, although I do know how to construct a fireless cooker if the need ever arises.  As I looked at my big spool of shmnutzy lace  I realized that washing mil...