sarah in nyc

I have been working away on Gavi's tallit which is made out of lace from her beautiful wedding dress. This is one of those projects that on paper seems simple. How hard could it be to trim a mile of lace trim off of a dress and then sew it to a new piece of silk to make a tallit? Amazon.com Widgets The answer is actually that it isn't all that difficult but it is time consuming.   I had to trim off the mile of lace trim and cut it away from all of the tulle that it had been stitched to. Did I mention that the lace was stitched on invisibly? Unpicking white  stitching from white tulle is hard on the eyes. After all of the lace had been unpicked I realized that it was actually dingy and needed to be washed. So I hand washed the mile of lace. I cut the silk Georgette to size and realized that the size my client and I thought made sense for her tallit would in fact be too short.  I suppose I could have just ordered another length of silk. Instead, I inset a stripe of la...

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...