sarah in nyc

 I  had two posts that I had planned to write between the last post and the one I am writing right now---but time just ran away from me. I had planned to write about my mother's Yahrzeit which we marked on Thursday night and Friday. I joined my sisters, through the magic of Zoom, at evening services Thursday night at KI in Brookline. One of the other participants was my long time Quincy friend Sandy.  We followed up Zoom services with a long, long Zoom chat. As always, our talks are long, open, and honest they way they can be when you know someone for close to sixty years. Earlier on Thursday, I baked. I made a weekday semolina bread. After the loaf was baked and I looked at how I had scored the loaf. I realized that my design was influenced by the article I had read earlier in the day about Ray Eames and her  textile designs. I also made challah. In honor of Purim I made poppy seed filled challot.  I mixed poppy seeds with some Ukranian jam I had found at Netco...

  Often, the hard part of doing a project isn't the work itself but the hard work of staying at the work even though it might be tedious.  Embroidering a biblical verse is my case in point. My usual trick to keeping at the task is to embroider the letters in a random order. I had hopes to have the colors used in the embroidery to shift across the verse so that trick to keep my nose to the grindstone wouldn't work. I had to come up with another trick to keep myself focused and not do dumb stuff to avoid the task at hand. Instead I pulled away the threads of the batiste as I finished each word. It is actually easier to work on small segments than big ones. This tallit is due soon so I really needed to just keep working away. מוֹנֶ֣ה מִ֭סְפָּר לַכּוֹכָבִ֑ים לְ֝כֻלָּ֗ם שֵׁמ֥וֹת יִקְרָֽא׃ He reckoned the number of the stars; to each He gave its name. Psalm 147:4   Given that this is the text on the atara/neckband I wanted to keep the sense of endless stars going throughout the...

 We are home! and between doing laundry and readjusting our internal clocks  to EST I have also started a project that is due in the middle of March. I have been asked to transform this beautiful embroidered shawl into a tallit. The base fabric is fine midnight blue cashmere and the design is embroidered in rayon  chainstitches. The verse for the atara is מוֹנֶ֣ה מִ֭סְפָּר לַכּוֹכָבִ֑ים לְ֝כֻלָּ֗ם שֵׁמ֥וֹת יִקְרָֽא׃ He reckoned the number of the stars; to each He gave its name. Psalm 147:4 I had thought when meeting with my client that I would dye a flat woven silk to look like the sky. But poking around my stash I found a bit of rayon jacquard woven tablecloth. I realized that if I dyed it it would look similar to the embroidered pattern on the shawl. Three layers of dye later, setting the color, rinsing out the excess dye and then pressing the fabric you get this. I calligraphed the text onto paper and then traced the lettering onto cotton batiste.  I could have ba...