sarah in nyc

Noah's invitation, closed. the text comes from God's promise to never again destroy the earth after the flood. The text is written in the form of a stylized olive leaf.  When I work in fabric I control the entire process. Doing graphics, I work in collaboration with the printer. I was lucky that Diane, Noah's mom chose to work with such an excellent printer. Marissa, from Quad Rite has a great eye and worked to make my part of the invitation just look better. Marissa suggested the  muted olive green ink. Diane who loves muted colors found a sage green envelope. Other times when I have done invitations, my work has been begun by hand, but then I manipulate the art work on the computer. This time, I worked the old fashioned way, completely by hand. Each draft was begun anew with pencil and rolling ruler. It was actually pleasant working this way. Marissa shrunk my work down by about 20% . Both Diane and I were grateful to Marissa's experience which made both of o...

Some days, it feels like have gotten nothing done. This is when having this blog comes in handy. As I think about what to post, it forces me to look back at my day and account for my day. Today I woke up before 5:30 because my youngest had to be awakened to be at school early for a class over night trip. I made him breakfast, ( with hot chocolate made with grated Callebaut chocolate and lots of vanilla) got him out the door for his trip to the country in the driving rain. I made a flyer for a building light bulb recycling project and tended to other building board work. I did a silly Bollywood dance workout video. I also made the first of five Cholesteral Death Kugel's that I'm making to serve this Shabbat after services as part of our goodbye for our oldest son. At this point, it was 9:30 am. I went to a rainy grave-side funeral in New Jersey. I also found a printer to do the print work on the invitation that I'm designing. Then I got to work on a second draft of t...

Most of my work is sewing, but I do sometimes work on paper. I designed invitations for each of my children's B' nai Mitzvah. I had also designed some wedding invitations for friends.. Earlier this year I had my first paid invitation job and that, led to this invitation job. Yesterday I put this invitation to bed, so to speak. The invitation is a gate-fold, so the top image opens to reveal the inner image. I have not included the specific invitation text. The text comes from Jacob's wrestling with the angel. We chose this particular verse because it seems to epitome that Bar-Mitzvah moment of choosing adulthood. I have really loved working with Jacob's mom. She claims to be a control freak. I have found her not to be that at all, but someone who is really careful about details. She is very appreciative of the effort that I have put in and I have found her wonderful to work with. Her attention to detail has made my job so much easier. I love how this piece is a m...

Today, I worked on making stripes that looked like water for my son's tallit . I cut two stencils out of index cards, after first drawing simple wave shapes on the cards with a pencil I used two different shades of blue oil paint sticks with an occasional, sparing use of yellow, and a slightly more aggressive use of white. This took a while, and doing this sort of repetitive work for a long period of time gets me slightly zoned out. By the time I am done, I feel like I have been under water for a long time. Shifting from seeing the piece from a myopic perspective to seeing it the way other folks will, is always a surprise. It always amazes me when it actually looks good. So many of the small bits offer so many opportunities for unhappiness. But the whole always looks better than it's individual parts. These stripes really do have the look of a river. I finished the willowy stripes as well. I have to let all of these strips sit for a couple of days before I set the color with a...