sarah in nyc

 Many years ago, I worked with a woman who had an idea about how to embellish t-shirts for women and embellish them and sell them.  My co-worker drew quite beautifully. One afternoon after work she went downtown to find shirts to embellish and she didn't find exactly  the shirt that she had in mind and she never pursued the project any further.  I was completely baffled. I couldn't understand how a slightly different shirt couldn't be used instead of the shirt she had originally envisioned. I have thought of that woman often over the decades and how for her, a small alteration of expectations just completely shut her down. So much of my work is about facing an obstacle and then pivoting---like a Roomba. I was about to start the atara for Terry's tallit. For those of you who have lives outside of reading my blog, here is a photo of Terry's tallit. It is made out of chunks of the tablecloth that Terry's mom embroidered for Terry's 20th birthday.  Terry's m...

    This nasty blob on the back of my student’s jacket.   Got transformed into this. A cool half belt sewn into the side seams of the jacket, many thanks to my wise friend Loretta, who suggested the half belt to hide the ugly teacher caused blob.   My student loved the simple and elegant solution. Many thanks Loretta.   Our next project is making a dress for an American Girl doll. We are starting out with a pattern. I have a pattern book from when my daughter was into those dolls in a big way.  My student is learning from my early sewing bumbles. We are lining the bodice of the dress .  It’s a much less fiddly way to get a clean finish on such a small garment. the end result looks more elegant with less work.   The doll will end up with a Vegas worthy dress. I will post more images after our next lesson.

Last week my student and I met. She made this jacket. It’s  made out of a lovely wool that arrived in a Fabric Mart Mystery Bundle .   There is a cute collar on the jacket that we drafted together. Attaching the collar left a raw edge on the inside of the jacket. My student had run out of sewing steam. When I suggested covering the raw edge with ribbon that attached to the jacket with iron on mending tape…my student loved the idea. It worked. Unfortunately, I had left a bit of the iron on mending tape on my ironing board.  I pressed the jacket and fused the mending tape to the lower center of the back.  I got most of it up, but the jacket has an ugly blog on the back, and it was my fault. I felt terrible. My student felt awful, and probably really angry and me as well, but she was too polite to yell at me. This is the blob. The fuseable blob is 6 inches up from the ham and is just about in the middle of the back of the jacket.  During the wee...

Friday, my husband finished his 11 months of saying Kaddish for his father. My husband brought breakfast  for the morning services regulars.   Usually, in the way that most couples divide up household tasks, if a task is food related, I take care of it. I wasn’t feeling very well on Thursday, so my husband did all of the planning and shopping for the breakfast on his own. I also have the feeling that he really wanted to do this task with no input from me. Friday, my husband brought home all of the left overs from the breakfast.  Most of a “Box O Joe “ was left over.  My synagogue was doing a pot luck kiddush  for Shabbat after morning services.   I made a coffee custard pie out of the rest of the “ Box O Joe” and the cup of cream sent along with the box of coffee  with  by Dunkin Donuts. I made a vanilla wafer crust and decorated the pie with coffee beans so people would know what flavor pie to expect. The pie was a hit.   I ...

After yesterday’s near disaster of making the pinot/corner pieces too big, I went back to the drawing board. I recut  smaller pieces and then did the calligraphy yet again. I needed to figure out how to edge the pinot. I noticed a ball of gold Lurex yarn in with my threads. The yarn had been given to me by my friend Yoki. It’s really flashy and glittery. It’s perfect used in small doses.     Yes, the tallit needs a good pressing. But here it is more or less complete . The eyelets still need to be done. The mis-sized pinah. I also cooked dinner for tonight. Broccoli roasted with sesame oil and rice vinegar. Vegetables roasted  until they are nearly charred are just so good. Broccoli on it’s own is not so delicious. Roasted it’s just amazing. Fingerling potatoes roasted with olive oil lemon juice and I forget which spices- I’m guessing that it's vaguely European in flavor.   Chicken roasted with an Israeli schwarma spice mix wit...

Yesterday, I began constructing the stripes for Ayelet’s tallit. Those of you with sharp eyes may notice that the green is much more emphatic than it was in yesterday’s photo. I over dyed it and it is now the color that Ayelet requested. the fabrics in their raw state I began by sewing strips of silk together. I had thought that I would construct the stripes out of simple strips of vertical stripes. My husband took a look at my work and said one deadly word,” Christmas”. I realized that he was right. The orange, pink and chartreuse combined to look like Target’s holiday theme of a couple of years back. it was time to re-think what I was doing. I made some of the green strips narrower.For some reason having the stripes run horizontally made them seem far less like Christmas. Adding the purple sashing also went far in improving the look.

I taught myself how to sew. I didn’t have the wise hands or words of a more experienced sewer helping me along.  I learned what I can now do from books and from making lots of really stupid mistakes. Many skills that others learn in home- ec, or in a moment from someone more experienced have been mastered by me, only after banging m,y head against the problem often and over a period of a decade or two. Mitering, doing that lovely turn on a trim that ends up with a perfect diagonal line in the corner was for many years a skill that was woefully beyond me. I would have to stop at the corner, take a deep breath and then come up with a solution that wasn’t all that ugly and messy. I did the best I could. I used to read and re read the directions in my various sewing books with as much care as I used to give to parsing a segment of Talmud. There are several different fail safe methods of achieving a perfect miter. I failed at all of the various method. This latest batch of chal...

Sometimes, my work goes along swimmingly. Every seam lines up just right. Materials that are known to not play nicely together, come together  with nary a whimper. Other times,figuring out the technical elements of my work is so hard, that it just makes my head hurt. During the past couple of days I have been working on several pieces that have all made my head hurt for various reasons. I do know that if I had a more traditional sewing background I probably would not attempt to line velvet with lame'. It looks wonderful, but it is a bear to sew. Sometimes when i am trying to puzzle out a problem, I will read a book. Michael Pollan's  A Place of My Own, has ended up being a most serendipitous choice. Pollan describes the process of building a small "writing house" on his property.  Despite it's being a tiny project, Pollan hired an architect to work with him. Reading about the design process, the discussion between architect and client, was terribly...

Those of us who sew will often call errors “design opportunities”. Yesterday, was a design opportunity day. I have been working on Linda’s tallit for a while. Mostly I have been working on the stripes. Linda was coming by yesterday with the pinot, corner pieces, and the atara, neckband that she is receiving from her rabbinical school. I thought that it would be nice if Linda could see her tallit assembled. I had already measured out the fabric for the tallit ad serged the raw edges. The stripes were being inserted, rather than being appliqued. So I had to cut off the equivalent of the width of the stripes from the fabric I was using for the body of the tallit. That accomplished, I was about to cut the remaining fabric in half and then sew those strips to the other side of the stripes. Well, I was fairly sleep deprived, and cut the remaining fabric going the wrong way. Linda was showing up in 15 minutes. The fabric is from the early ‘90’s and is no longer being manufactured. I had b...

Rachel's waves I’m now working on the ocean portion of Rachel’s tallit. I layers three colors of Shantung, a turquoise a blue/grey and a dark green.T stitched waves and then began cutting away layers of the silk. while I was working, I found a length of silk charmeuse that I had dyed in blue/greens. I’m adding some waves in the charmeuse. Once the piece looks oceany enough, I will then satin stitch and cover all of the raw edges. I suppose that there other other ways to build an ocean out of fabric, but this is my favorite method. crossing Broadway Walking on the south bound lane of Broadway after the storm And now for the continuing weather report.  You can see that at 9:00 this morning, that Broadway was still unpopulated by cars, you can see the lone walker walking south.  The cross streets were still unplowed. A little later on in the day I saw parents pulling their little one on a sled, going west. During the night I saw the Chinese restaurant delivery men weav...

Sun and natural fibers are not friends. Usually that isn't a problem with clothing. But when you are dealing with curtains that hang in a sunny window, you basically have three choices. You can put up synthetics, or you can put up many layered draperies that take a long time to develop sun rot, or you can replace your curtains fairly often. My bedroom is one of the two rooms in my apartment that actually gets sunlight. I have gone the, replace often, route with the bedroom curtains. The last pair were blue chambray ones from Target. They lasted surprisingly well. As the house will be filled with company for Thanksgiving, some of the many flaws the the apartment are becoming unbearable. We have been doing some clutter purging and organizing. I also noticed that the bedroom curtains have fallen prey to sun-rot. It was time to replace them I stopped by Target yesterday, and hated all of the curtains they were selling. Friday, a box had arrived from http://www.fabric.com/ . I had...

I grew up reading tons of how to books. I loved working my way through the entire extensive hand work collection at the Thomas Crane Public library. Often, that knowledge comes in handy. I get stuck and then the illustrations and directions from a book I may have read when I was twelve come to me. I know, other people have heads filled with Torah. My head is filled with how to directions from various sources. The reason I needed to distract myself yesterday, was that I needed to apply lettering to the parochet/ark curtain. Applying lettering to a piece has been a point of difficulty for artisans, even back in ancient times. There is a mosaic floor in Israel from Roman times. The lettering is in mirror writing. It isn't in mirror writing as a cipher or hidden message, but rather because the artisan, clearly asked his friend with a nice handwriting to do the lettering. The friend wrote out the letters with a piece of charcoal. The artisan then patted the charcoaled lettering onto t...

Last year  I was shopping in the fabric district with some of my sewing buddies. Between the three of us, we bought a lot of fabric.At the cash register there was a bin of remnants.  For sewers, this is akin to putting candy bars near the checkout line. Impulse purchase!!!!When nifty fabrics are so inexpensive,it's easy to have a "why not" attitude about buying. Mis-dyed purple stretch lace? Why not?  Orange oil cloth? Why not? Quilted midnight blue patent leather? Why not? A few yard of soiled white novelty knit?? Why not? One of my "why not"s was a black cotton blend pointelle sweater knit with a lurex thread. It had some damage to it but it looked like there was enough to make a sweater. The shop owner might have just thrown it in as a freebie because of the damage. I can't for the moment remember exactly how little I paid for the piece, but it cost less than getting to and from the garment district. I kept pulling it out every couple of weeks and tri...

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...

The atara/neckband of Joshua's tallit  is to be made out of the central part of a belt that was made out of units of Hmong work.  I have seen lots of this work which is made by the Hmong of Cambodia. Their traditional handwork is a combination of reverse applique and embroidery. I have never seen the work done on such a refined scale. It's a really beautiful piece. The central panel and the two outer ones presented something of an iconographic problem. The geometric design is one of crosses. If I were making something for Josh's home I would have no problem with having something that wasn't meant as a religious cross, but was simply a geometric design  that resembled a cross . I had brought the issue up to both Joshua and his mom. They were fine with the crosses. I was ok with the crosses in theory. But the closer the tallit comes to completion, the more it looks like a religious garment, but not one for Josh's religion. My husband took one look and...