sarah in nyc

  A while back I had repaired two pairs of boots using a bit of leather that I had on hand and some barge glue that I had purchased for the task. The dark pair at the bottom of the photo also had some rips in the heel area. The boots are so incredibly comfortable but the rip at the heel made the boots look really shabby. My fabric stash is sort of like the state of my brain, meaning awfully messy. But the other day a leather skirt that I had purchased at a thrift for the sole purpose of mending, emerged form the chaos that is my fabric stash.I traced the back heel piece onto newsnapaer and cut it out to be a pattern for this mending adventure. I plunked my newspaper pattern onto the suede side of the leather and traced around the newspaper with a pencil.I then cut out the piece using a pair of scissors and then repeated the process so my two boots would match. I spread the barge glue (it's rubber cement but stronger) onto the back of the leather piece using a very specialized tool,...

 A few years ago I bought a cotton quilt (cotton batting covered in cotton broadcloth)  for us to use during the summer. Truth be told, we use this quilt year round because my husband likes sleeping under a big pile of blankets. A week or so ago I realized that there was a big tear in the quilt about an inch from the edge. about four feet's worth of tear. If my mother owned this quilt she would have tossed it. My husband always sees the good side in people and also in objects. Why should one toss something that is nearly good?  I live with my husband and not with my late mother so I knew that I needed to come up with a way to mend this quilt.  My husband has lived with me for a long, long time so he suggested that I fix the tear using my serger or perhaps machine stitch the tear to a long strip of cotton. Neither one is a bad suggestion. I have been doing a whole lot of mending these days and I have come to learn that aside from fixing a tear mending needs to not be ...

  We are told that we should retell the Passover story beginning with the terrible stuff and ending with the glory. I am following the same precept here in this post. Earlier this week I was recovering an armchair and needed to get my staple gun from the little closet in our maid's room. Before you think that I am a fancy lady with a live in maid, you should know that nearly every Manhattan apartment built for middle class folks in the pre WW1 era was constructed with a little room off the kitchen for the maid. In the days before most people owned electric appliances like washing machines and vacuum cleaners one needed a maid to keep your head above water.  Some people use the maid's room as a home office or as a room for a child. Ours functions as a basement. The plastic bins that hold Costco dry goods are there, some of our Passover pots live there, our kids college textbooks, the washer and dryer and a closet filled with hardware supplies and tools. As I reached for the sta...

  Yesterday was my mother's 9th Yahrziet.  My sisters marked that day last month. This is a leap year with two months of Adar. As with many points of Jewish law, the issue of when to mark the Yahrzeit is up for debate, do we mark it on the first or on the second Adar. One of the things that I love about Jewish law is that  it is possible to hold two opposite ideas in our heads at the same time.  The rabbis that my sisters consulted suggested that they observe the anniversary of  our mother's death during the first Adar. my rabbi told me to observe the day on the second Adar. My mother's death came after a particularly hard Boston winter with snowstorm after snowstorm including one that took place the night before her funeral. One of my sisters remarked that she liked marking the Yahrzeit while it was still wintery in Boston. Our mother's funeral had to be delayed by a couple of days because of all of the snow. The path to the grave for each and every funeral had...

 At some point when my older son was in middle school, he is thirty two now, you do the math, I bought him some Arizona jeans. I no longer remember the price.  He wore them until he outgrew them. My younger son then inherited them.  My younger son has been wearing those jeans for at least fifteen years.  Every once in a while my son brings me those jeans to mend. I can't count how many times I have mended them. A few weeks back my son brought them to be mended again. The thighs were so worn out they resembled gauze.  I reinforced the thighs from the wrong side. I added a piece of linen to the inside of each pant leg and then stitched the new fabric to the fragile denim. That ought to  buy another year or so of wear.  I used yarn  to graft the linen inside of the pant leg to the denim. I used machine stitching on the other leg to do the same task. The knee blow outs took place in the past I have reinforced the  top of the waistband with variou...