sarah in nyc

The High Holiday season drew to a close this week, but unfortunately my cold has decided to hang on.  Between the truncated work weeks with only three and a half available workdays and my body needing to nap often, fitting in work was a bit of a challenge. I began work on Alice's tallit,  embellishing  the ribbon that will become the stripes on her tallit. This is what the ribbons look like right off the roll. I began working on the red and black striped ribbon. First I embroidered an orange cross stitch.  The I added a gold star stitch.  For some reason the roll of red checked ribbon decided to go into hiding. I can't find that roll of ribbon anywhere.  Rather than panicking, I unpicked the same ribbon from a tablecloth I had made a while back.  Normally, undoing stitching is a job I loathe, but being sick leaves me with a very tiny brain. My tiny brain is exactly the right size for unpicking a mile of stitching. I now have e...

    The beef portion of  Shabbat dinner is cooked sliced and now topped with a vinegary, hot and smokey sauce and is warming for tonight. Joining the meat in our oven is rice cooked in last week's chicken juice.  I made cinnamon and brown sugar meringues for dessert. The bunny has been appliqued to the front of the sweater. A bit of iron on hem tape helped hold the bunny in place while I satin stitched the applique to the polar fleece. Hemming still needs to happen on the sleeves. This sweater probably won't be worn for several months, but it was deemed adorable by my son when he came home from work.  It is finally spring. I just hope it hangs around for a few weeks before the weather becomes unbearable for me. These roses were a surprise from a friend.  I felt like a pretend Martha Stewart arranging the roses in a cup set into my leaky silverplate teapot. Shabbat Shalom!

When I was in elementary school it seemed like every other child in my class had a granny square vest made by their grandmother. Both boys and girls wore their granny square vests. Girls tended to wear theirs in bright colors and boys in manly browns and beiges. Some of those grandmothers seemed to be accomplished needlewomen, others crochet with more enthusiasm than skill. My grandmother died just before that fad hit. And even if she were not underground in New Jersey, the chances of her crocheting me such a vest were slim to none. Mama was not known for her needlework. I envied the kids with grandmothers or great-aunts who used to make them ugly vests, or sweaters or stocking caps. In the last few months, I have become a great-aunt twice. I have been enjoying the opportunity to make things for these two little girls in our family. Before I make something for a baby I think about what it is like to be the mother of a small baby. You are sleep deprived and don't really ha...

My dear friend Marcia (known in our family as Tanta Marcia) invited me to go to a lecture yesterday about  Ludwig Wolpert  given by a Ph.D. candidate at Bard who was writing her dissertation about Wolpert's work during his New York years. Well, going to such a lecture is high up on my idea of fun. Amazon.com Widgets I finally learned the name of Wolpert's first metalsmithing teacher,  Christian Dell . Clearly there was a strong dell influence in Wolpert's work. You can see how the use of actual text used during the ritual when the cup is used rather than Dell's glyphs created a more powerful, more meaningful piece. I loved the lecture, loved seeing deeply familiar and beloved work by Mr. Wolpert. I went home feeling very happy. I knew that something special would be awaiting me. My father's father was born in Konin, Poland and arrived in New York before WW1. My father's mother was born here, but both of her parents were born there too...

  As of Friday, I had the raw yardage my son had chosen for his sweater.   Yesterday, I made the sweater. I based it off of one of his dress shirts. my son and I had several conversations about the shape he was looking for in this sweater.   My son discovered that the fabric was not so comfortable against his skin so I cobbled together a lining for the sleeves ad the upper torso, after I had sewn the sweater together.  Luckily the sweater fabric had lots of drape ( as did the lining).   My son likes how the sweater matches his silver pants. Because I learned how to sew after my kids were born and had a whole lot to learn before I began to make clothing, I realize that my youngest probably has had more of his clothing sewn by me than either of his older siblings. My husband has a fear of having his clothing being conspicuous. Clearly my youngest has not inherited this worry.

This year my kids decided to go as the three kids in the cartoon series “ Bob’s Burgers”. My youngest is going as Louise Belcher, the youngest child in the family. I was drafted into making the costume. I made the bunny hat last night. I used the hood of my older son’s sweatshirt as more or less the pattern. The cotton lycra jersey was in my stash. I’m really proud of the bunny ears. I used cardboard from a granola bar carton to give the ears shape. I didn’t own any chartreuse knit fabric so I paid a visit to Kabbala Man and bought the rayon jersey. I used an existing T- shirt of my son’s to draft the dress. He’s pleased with the result. I think my son may keep the beard although I will be drafted to put his hair in pigtails. While I was in the garment district one of the stores on 8th Avenue was selling  big spools of gold metallic thread and other notions in industrial sized rolls. They charged me $6 per cone ( and $5 for the opened blue cone). I have paid as much as $...

We often refer to my youngest as “ The Buttless Wonder”.  Back in the day when he had to wear a uniform for school he was too skinny for Old Navy slim pants and had to wear suspenders. I ended up having to make his school pants because it was just too hard to find pants that were slim enough to fit him. Ten years later, my youngest is a whole lot taller but still really skinny. Recently he has fallen in love with wearing really skinny flashy pants.   My son has a skinny friend who gave him a pair of Beetlejuice black and white striped jeans that she had grown tired of. My son’s skinny friend is , as she ought to be , built like a girl, and is not a buttless wonder. The pants were baggy in the butt and were falling down. I offered to alter the pats. This is a skill that is far out of my usual wheelhouse.   I removed the waistband at the side seams and at the back seam and took the pants in at each of those three points.   I then had to make the waistba...

I cook for my mother last week. Now it has become time to cook Rosh haShanah food for my family. This year,  the two days of holiday are followed by Shabbat, the dreaded three days of Yom Tov. While in theory it can be lovely, three days in a row of long services and big meals can frankly be a bit wearing, and wearying. Yesterday I tackled the laundry that my boys had sort of done while I was gone. I also began cooking. I made two small roasts and a tzimmis. The pot below is large enough to hold a 30 lb. turkey. It was completely filled to the brim with  raw sweet potatoes, white potatoes, carrots and meat.  Both the meat and the tzimmis take a long cook.   I also baked a bread, and we made pizza for the family. Yesterday was one of those pricelessly hot and muggy New York days. Cod Ed held back power. We were unable to run the air conditioner. I could not stand the heat, but I stayed in the kitchen. The meat and the tzimmis are all neatly packaged in m...