sarah in nyc

Usually when I post about work I take photos all along the way and then take you, my dear readers, along the journey. Well, I failed as a blogger this times so please forgive me. Our dear friends Art and Kathy are both pretty big deals in the Jewish world and they both are serious collectors of American antiques. Kathy died a few years back. But at some point, perhaps in the 1970s Kathy made a bargello tallit bag for Art with a matching t'fillin bag. Kathy's bargello needlepoint was inspired by the needlework done by American women in the 18th century to replicate expensive Jacquard tapestry work. I am not going to talk about Kathy's deliberate  choice to use old American needlecrafts to create Jewish ritual objects but I will leave you to write that little essay in your own head During a visit with Art this summer he pulled out his t'fillin bag and asked me to repair it. We spoke for a bit about how fond Kathy and I were of one another. We also spoke about our shared l...

 A couple of posts ago I wrote about restoring  the challah cover I had given to my sister . When I wrote the post I was only partially done. I had cut away the rotted silk, found a good replacement, (the reverse of a red jacquard weave upholstery fabric),  had stitched the center panel with the lettering to the new and stronger fabric, and covered the join with a braid that I had embroidered. My next task was to stitch the Chinese brocade to the upholstery fabric and to cover that raw edge.  One might ask why I didn't just disassemble the whole challah cover. Brocade is incredibly shreddy fabric. If I unpicked the brocade border and tried to reassemble the entire challah cover the process of unpicking would likely leave me with shredded bits of brocade that would have become much smaller during the tedious job of un-sewing. I carefully placed the upholstery fabric into position  (in the photo above it is just slightly skewed). I basted everything into position ...

Today I was asked to fix a Torah mantle.  If you only looked at the top of the mantle you would think that it looked like it was in good shape.  The bottom inch or so was completely looked chewed up.The velvet had worn away. In fact, the last couple of inches at one of the sides was completely gone. The mantle was made out of a shade of plum velvet that was popular during the late 1980's and would be difficult if not impossible to match. I thought that I could construct a ribbon to cover all of the ugly bits. I began by stitching two rows of plum velvet ribbon to the navy blue grosgrain.using a bronze metallic thread. it was a good beginning but not quite enough. I then noticed the embroidered border of grapes at the top of the mantle. So I painted a row of grapes in the center of the ribbon. It took a while. I sewed the ribbon onto the mantle and patched up some of the really grotty bits on the inside of the mantle. I noticed that th...

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...

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...