sarah in nyc

Rachel's waves I’m now working on the ocean portion of Rachel’s tallit. I layers three colors of Shantung, a turquoise a blue/grey and a dark green.T stitched waves and then began cutting away layers of the silk. while I was working, I found a length of silk charmeuse that I had dyed in blue/greens. I’m adding some waves in the charmeuse. Once the piece looks oceany enough, I will then satin stitch and cover all of the raw edges. I suppose that there other other ways to build an ocean out of fabric, but this is my favorite method. crossing Broadway Walking on the south bound lane of Broadway after the storm And now for the continuing weather report.  You can see that at 9:00 this morning, that Broadway was still unpopulated by cars, you can see the lone walker walking south.  The cross streets were still unplowed. A little later on in the day I saw parents pulling their little one on a sled, going west. During the night I saw the Chinese restaurant delivery men weav...

Sometimes working on a tallit feels less like sewing and more like construction work. The "Not Mets" orange and blue tallit is no exception. I have been working on constructing the stripe which are being made out of four different colors of silk shantung. The four colors are also four entirely different qualities and weights of fabric. If you were someone taught to sew by a home-ec teacher, you would know that this is not a good thing to do. You are supposed to sew fabrics of similar weights one to another. I am self taught, so I am going to pretend that I don't know this piece of sewing wisdom. One of the major reasons for this feigned ignorance is the fact that it is impossible to find four colors of shantung in the same weight. While the Shantungs that I purchased, are probably not hand woven, the tangerine colored silk feels like it was made on not quite mechanized looms made with silk threads that were not particularly closely inspected for uniformity. It looks a wh...

A psychology text I read many years ago talked about how small children often use very specific and personal imagery as descriptors, not realizing that the person they are speaking to may not have any idea what the child is speaking about. In the example used, the child was shown a photograph of a puddle of water. The surface of the water was ruffled by the wind. The child described the puddle as reminding him of "sheet". The adult tester was assuming a freshly ironed sheet on a freshly made bed and felt that the child's answer was incorrect. The child was thinking about his crumpled sheets in the morning. When I read that so many years ago, I imagined the child's face close to those crumpled sheets just as his eyes were opening in the morning, those wrinkles close up to his opening eyes. I found his description wonderfully evocative. Although that psychology book assumed that those sorts of deeply personal descriptors are replaced by more general, universal ones, I h...