sarah in nyc

The Passover dishes are all put away with a great deal of help from my husband and kids and my son's friend. Shir haShirim, the Songs of Songs is  usually read on Passover and one of the famous lines there is "for lo the winter is past.." I grew up in New England where a snowstorm in April is not unheard of. Usually, I think that my New York neighbors are weenies when they complain about the cold in April. But this year, despite the Song of Songs and despite the calendar day after day feels like late November. The calendar does read April though so my next tallit is due fairly soon. This tallit is being made for a young man who was born in Ethiopia. I am using parts of an Ethiopian hand woven scarf in the tallit. The text that is tying the tallit together comes from the teachings of Nachman of Bratslav. The melody was written by Baruch Chait who was a member of the band The Rabbi's Sons which was the Orthodox version of The Beatles. Their music was even more ...

I made this dress this afternoon. The lace began life as my living room curtain about twenty years ago. The curtain was a really early sewing project for me. It was one of a pair. I was always fond of the fabric. I have been noticing lots of lace dresses made with brightly contrasting linings. OK so that was the genesis of the idea. I also have a huge fabric stash. Sometimes it feels good just to use some of it up. I started by copying a basic dress.   The shape  of the dress was this. The lace had a finished selvedge edge. it would be silly to not use such a pretty hem as the dress hem. That finished hem meant that it made more sense to cut the dress with a straighter shape. more like this:   I cut the lace to the dress shape and a piece of hot pink Swiss dot cotton for the lining to the right shape. I sewed the lining to the lace.The starting dress was a knit. Everyone who knows anything about sewing knows that a dress with no stretch has to be cut b...

Is on the menu for tonight’s dinner.  Yeah, I love that the colors look like they migrated from a piece of Marimekko fabric. Mostly though, it’s how my day has felt. I was done with my workout just before 11:00 am when I remembered that my building turned off the water for the day at 10:00am for some sort of a maintenance task. I now see the downside of not owning cases of seltzer. I washed up using what was left in my electric kettle. needless to say, I felt completely grody on this warm and muggy day. I’m working away on the T-shirt quilt. I have now used up nearly all of the t-shirts. At this point it feels like a complicated word puzzle that I’m in the middle of solving. I’m not ready to show photos, but soon it will be time to join the three strips together. As I was about to go grocery shopping because it feels like Old Mother Hubbard’s house around here, we had a giant sloppy rainfall. Instead I made a load of pita, fixed up a pickled cabbage salad from several day...

 Apron illistrations from Smart Sewing- 1949  My own take on the domestic goddess uniform-My apron is knee length on me. Sometimes it seems as if you can’t have a sewing blog without featuring aprons.  My mother never, ever wore an apron. My father though, used to wear a big denim, butcher’s apron when he baked bread. For lots of the women about half a generation younger than I am who are sewing and blogging about it, aprons seem to evoke a sort of “days of yore domesticity”. lots of these blogging young women have taken on apron wearing in a tongue in cheek sort of a way. A few years back I had made myself a butcher’s apron that didn’t quite work. but I wore it when I baked bread. One of my sisters had given me the 1949 edition of “Smart Sewing” an annual magazine with nifty sewing projects. I fell in love with the darted aprons made out of a bias square of fabric and finished off with a big ruffle. I wanted an apron that would provide more coverage for bread ...

Finish raw edges of tank top as you wish. I serged the edges, folded then to the inside and then added a decorative black elastic. You can add a crosswise strip of the same or conrtasting fabric, or apply fold-over elastic. It took me longer to set up this tutorial on the web than it took me to make the tank.