sarah in nyc

There has been a bunch on my plate, some of it work for clients and some of it that falls into that category of other. In the other category, I just completed this sweater for our Santa Barbara great niece. I bought the green yarn at Santa Barbara's best thrift store when we visited last summer. A fancy yarn store had gone out of business and had donated gorgeous yarns to the thrift store. The beautiful carved shell flower hook closure comes from the stash of my friend Pearl's mother.  Pearl's mother was a really excellent knitter. She knit herself beautiful suits that she wore to each of her grandchildren's bar-mitzvahs. I have a small leather change purse from her stuffed with wonderfully carves shell buttons. This closure would be great even if it were made out of plastic but out of carved shell, well, you just can't get any better. I used the flower embroidered ribbon to give the clasps a firm footing. They also do a good job of jazzing up th...

A coupe of words of warning before you read this post. I realize that this post may be of zero interest to anyone but me. It is about the truly annoying process I have been going through to figure out how to do what ought to be a simple task. The finished piece will be wonderful. This particular journey has been an exercise in frustration. I guess I am writing about it because a finished piece usually doesn't show the many stumbles in the road to getting there. I am showing you all of those stumbles, but please feel free to skip this post. I promise my feelings won't be hurt. I am making an atara ( the neckband for a tallit) with a nice kid in my synagogue who is having his bar-mitzvah next month. He came up with a pretty brilliant concept for the atara- he wanted several texts from the morning prayers on his atara. We talked about what this ought to look like. We agreed that it should look kind of like an old fashioned prayer book. Many old prayer books are typeset in a ...

My childhood friend Rachely has a new phone with a camera and has been posting beautiful nature photos mostly from her neighborhood on Facebook. Her lovely photos have sparked a conversation between Rachely and her friends  about honesty and photo editing. I have been using a digital camera for a long time now. One of my frustrations with a digital camera, actually with cameras, in general, is that they don't always capture what your eye is seeing. I might be drawn to take a photo because of a particularly beautiful quality of light. Once I take the photo the quality that drew my eye, might be missing in the photo. I feel that this is an honest use of photo editing. With the magic of photo editing, I can show what it was that my eye actually saw. I have also discovered over time that while digital cameras are wonderful, they have fairly limited digital brains. I bump up to the limited abilities of my digital camera when photographing some of my work. ...