sarah in nyc

Navah is one of the few people here in New York who knows me from childhood. She and her husband were several years younger than my parents. They were the cool grownups in my childhood memories.  I am wearing the blindingly white tights, Navah is wearing a cool peasant inspired maxi dress  Amazon.com Widgets Navah has been needle pointing tallit bags for her husband, her son and her grandchildren. I would guess that the first of the bags was in the planning stages when the above photo was taken.( This was the great hey-day of needlepoint. My own adventures in needlepoint began right around this time.  For the last several years I have been providing the lettering for Navah's tallit bags. This time after completing her bag Navah asked me to also construct the bag. While I had done lots of needlepoint from the ages of 11 to 18 or so, finishing off needlepoint was not something I had done before. I found several sites that explained how to finish the pi...

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...

Occasionally, my husband and I read Torah at our synagogue. To read Torah you essentially have to memorize a passage of text and the musical notations connected with the text. The Torah scroll does not contain vowels, any indications of breaks between verses or the notations for the cantillations. I noticed a few months back that my husband and I study for our readings in entirely different ways. He works in a methodical way, learning each verse flawlessly before he goes on to learn the next verse. I have trouble learning that way. I do better going over and over the whole assigned chunk of text. As I go over the text some un-related chunks begin to come together. Eventually the learned chunks out number the unlearned chunks and finally the whole text is complete.  I'm working on the Schechter parochet/ark curtain in a similar way. The earth is mostly done, but not completely done. I have added some, but not all of the shimmer to the water, the lettering on the arch is done but...

Lettering painted on mystery fabric. One recurring issue in my Art History classes in college, is the frustration that Art Historians, restorers and viewers of later generations have with artists who use materials that change nature or even disintegrate over time. The Madonnas of early Renaissance paintings were painted wearing sky blue robes, apinted with ultramarine, that have darkened to dark lapis blue over time. The Abstract Expressionists of the 1950's used house paint or car enamel on canvas. Paintings have rotted away because the paint and backing didn't like one another. As someone who now makes art, I understand why artists make those errors.  I'm working away on the parochet/ark curtain for the Solomon Schechter School. Right now, I'm working on a celestial archway that will contain the words " Raise up the gateways above your heads". I chose a beautiful bronze fabric with a metallic sheen for the arch. I have no idea what the fabric is. I susp...

My oldest son is leaving next week for his stint in the Israeli Army. I have been making Cholesterol death Kugel to bring for Kiddush on Shabbat, after services. So far, I have made four. I still need to make one more. But, as I keep making the kugel over and over again, I keep being struck by how well structured this recipe is. In my book, a real recipe that has been created by a real home cook is structures so that each step dovetails into the next so you can go about your business setting up each stage of the cooking, and the the next piece is ready to go just as you need it. So with the kugel, you preheat the oven with 1/2 a stick of butter in the cooking pan. then you put up the pot of noodles. Then you begin mixing the custard. Just as the oven beeps to let you know it is preheated, the butter is melted and ready to pour into the custard. As soon as that is mixed in, the noodles are ready to be drained. The nice thing about a recipe like this is that you have very little wasted...

I realize, that most Tuesday mornings, I iron. It's not a job that I particularly love. It's a job that I do. Usually, my ironing session is made up of the table cloths used the previous week. Since we are in  Jewish Holiday season, my stack of ironing included lots of men's dress shirts. Again, not a task I love, but there is a certain satisfaction in turning the crumpled into the smooth. Growing up, my mother used to say that she did her best thinking while vacuuming or ironing. Today while I was pressing the large stack of table cloths and shirts I was working on figuring out the next big piece . I was asked to create a parochet/ark curtain for the local Solomon Schechter  School. The 8th grade girls ( they are all girls in this class)donated a portion of their bat- mitzvah gift money to create a parochet for their school's new synagogue space. Last week I met with the girls twice. We looked at the texts that are said while the ark is "active", just bef...