sarah in nyc

There is a school of thinking in Constitutional Law that believes in original intent. That is they try to intuit what the founding fathers were actually thinking and then base their own legal rulings based on that original intent. While I am not of the school of original intent when it comes to American law, sewing in the manner that I do, I do end up stumbling onto  the clothing equivalent of original intent.     About ten years ago my youngest attended school on Madison  Avenue. Yes, that Madison Avenue.  Once after a teacher conference, I walked uptown on Madison Avenue .  During my walk I noticed that a fancy lingerie store was having a giant sale.  One of the life lessons I learned from my mother is that you should always check out a sale in a really fancy store. Listening to my mother paid off. On the $25 rack was a beautiful white spa robe. I needed a new bathrobe.   I took the robe to the cashier. The cashier became all flu...

Yesterday was a Domestic Goddess day. I did many loads of laundry. I unclogged the bathtub drain. I unclogged the bathroom sink drain. My daughter wants more blouses to wear to work. Unfortunately, the style for cute young things like my daughter that is currently being sold are in our family parlance,” too foofy”.  For people that speak standard English, that means too frilly. Ruffles are now hot. My daughter is allergic to ruffles. When my daughter was younger I had found directions on a now defunct blog on how to transform a man’s dress shirt into a woman’s blouse. I have re-made my daughter several blouses  out of men’s dress shirts over the past many years. I made this one for her yesterday. I cut the shirt two buttons below the collar and cut in a continuous oval. I then serged the raw edge. Then I folded the serged edged to the inside of the shirt and zigzagged 1/4 inch elastinc inside the fold.  I shirred the waist onto four rows of stretched elastic. I cut th...

Last week was a really hard week.  Each day came with terrible news. I’m fine and my kids are fine. But  a relative was diagnosed with a terrible illness.  A friend’s child woke up dead and a sweet young man committed suicide. It’s all a bit much to assimilate in just a few days.  It does make it hard to work. My kids have begun subscribing to Netflix. We have been enjoying an orgy of reality TV. My son now claims to be addicted to   Intervention . Watching Hoarders   has convinced me that we don’t need to keep quite as much stuff as we currently keep around. My husband gets very attached to objects. He also feels strongly that just a few holes or wear spots doesn’t mean that something isn’t perfectly good. I was given a block printed table cloth several years ago. It had belonged to my friend’s mother. it’s hand printed cotton from India and was purchased from Bonwit- Teller in the mid 1960’s. I assume that when it was new it had a coarse feel. It's be...