sarah in nyc

 I have been working on more wedding related stuff. Amazon.com Widgets The kippot are all completed. I think I finished the shawls. Yes, they need a better pressing but don't worry, the attendants won't look like they slept in their finery. This is the stencil that I used for the scarves. No, I didn't use the elephant. The stencil itself isn't perfect (I would have preferred a more complex design) but it does well enough. Surprisingly the hardest bit of all of this turquoise and gold fabulousness has been creating the pocket squares.  I have experienced several failures along the way. One layer of this silk is NOT fun to work with. The pocket squares are all going to be self-lined. For some reason I don't quite understand, precutting the pocket squares and stenciling them works less well than stenciling a long length of fabric and then cutting it up. So after much too much time, I have three pocket squares completed and I think s...

Yesterday my case of the yucks  had retreated enough so I could get a bit of work done. Amazon.com Widgets This tallit is being made foe Cavill, a rabbinical student. The due date is soon, really soon. My fist task was to cut strips of silk for the stripes. The best way to do this task is to snip a cut into the fabric, and then pull a thread at the center of the cut. The pulled thread leaves you with a line that shows you exactly where to cut. This beautiful silk tussah made the task of pulling the thread difficult. But time on the phone with BOTH of my sisters made passing the time a bit easier. Eventually it was time to start painting the text. Both my home growing up and the Jewish day school that I attended had similar approaches to spirituality in prayer. This approach may be foreign to those more familiar with the world of Jewish Renewal where the attainment of spiritual satisfaction is both more paramount and more public. I was brought up in a tradition where t...

Whenever I create a piece with a client, the client always lives in my head during the time I am working.  I think about our conversation during the design meeting during the time I am working on a piece and even while I am not actually working but going about my daily life while the piece sits fallow.  If a piece is complicated or unusual, or involves some interesting textiles or my learning a new technique, the piece and the client become part of me during my time working.  Amazon.com Widgets Sometimes it isn't the piece itself but the client that really stays  with me. So when I get a call from someone who says "I don't know if you would remember me, but we made a tallit together ten years ago." I always remember who they are, the piece we created together and what the experience of working together was like. Fifteen years ago I made this set of arba kanfot for a really remarkable client. Her Iowa born great grandmother had crochet this dress topper. If yo...

 Last winter I had begun a tallit making workshop for a synagogue. Between session 1 and 2 the Rabbi's mother died.  I was supposed to lead a session and had to cancel because my own mother was dying. We re-started  the project a while back. Amazon.com Widgets I suppose that if i decided ahead of time exactly what every participants tallit would look like, if I came up with some sort of a standard tallit formula I suppose it might have been an easier class to run. It does create more of a demand from a class to ask them to really think through both what is a tallit and what is YOUR tallit ( as opposed to what is a tallit that you could purchase in a Judaica store).  The class is made up of people with a really wide range of sewing skills (from zero to highly competent) as well as a similarly large range of Jewish knowledge and Jewish texts. So far the sessions have all taken place in a preschool in the Bronx with teeny tables and chairs. It was...

I know I have been posting mostly about cooking lately but there has also been sewing gong on in my life. This tallit is nearly done. This tallit technically has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. I had to produce something that was pieced, but only one layer and could be “read” properly on both sides. I covered the seams on this side with the vintage ombre purple grosgrain. The reverse has the seams covered with the vintage checkerboard red and black ribbon. The outer edges of the tallit will be covered with a wide multicolor grosgrain.The ribbon also adds a fair amount of strength to the tallit. Every time my husband sees me working on this tallit he winces and says, “ It’s awfully bright.” it is very bring but I’m not making this for my husband but for a client who wanted this level of bright.   I have just begun working on a tallit for a new client that combines wonderful old textiles with new ones. Here is a preview. It’s always an honor to work...

Today’s post is a jumble of thoughts, a blog salad if you will.   Yesterday was the Yahrzeit of my mother’s friend Rachelle. I think they met in college. My mother kept  very few of her pre-marriage friends. Rachelle was one of them. Rachelle’s daughter Miriam was in my class in school. She was unfailingly nice to me in a place where kindness was a rare experience for me. I went to several of Miriam’s birthday parties. At one of those parties, Rachelle served not the regular frosting topped birthday cake but a Dobos  Torte.  I have eaten Dobos Torte exactly once, at Miriam's birthday party in 1969, and I still remember that hard caramel topped  many layered cake. The cake was a wonder to look at it it’s thin layers of cake and frosting. It was a sophisticated thing to serve to elementary school kids. I remember that Rachelle warned us that it was rich and we shouldn’t eat too much of it. I ate two slices.   In 1978, Rachelle published this cookboo...

Jean and I went shopping for the fabric for her tallit a few months ago. She had chosen a delicious black ribbed silk for the body of the tallit. Jean also fell in love with a complex striped silk that included stripes in satin , and gold brocade. The stripes silk was expensive. it was sold by the panel. The stripe pattern didn’t repeat. My original plan was to have the stripes continue to the inside of the tallit.   Once I got the fabric home I realized that this was not possible.  there simply wasn’t enough of the same element of the stripe pattern to have the same bit of the stripe pattern on both the face and the lining of the tallit. I spent a little while feeling completely stymied by the problem. Jean, ever gracious, was prepared to find new  new fabric.  I was not ready to give up that easily. She had invested a fair amount of money in the fabric. I didn’t want to see such beautiful fabric go to waste. Also Jean is a really careful decider. It takes...

After a long and difficult winter, it is finally spring, not just by the calendar but by the weather as well. The street trees have begun to bloom. I am also doing the spring time task of catching up on ironing all of the table cloths I used during Passover. Well, I actually haven’t gotten through all of the cloths.  I have done about half of them. I also ironed most of the napkins we used for the two Seders. Unlike my mother who was a big believer in using matching napkins at a meal, I use a mix of similar napkins. Some in the stack are from my mother, others I inherited from other people.  All of them are roughly the same size and are ivory linen with taupe cutwork. I think that like the various people at the table, they can get along even if they are not identical.   I also began constructing the stripes for two very different tallitot for two very different people. This black gold and blue tallit is for Jean.   She had taken a  tallit wor...

Isabel’s tallit is complete. We just have to schedule the tzitzit tying. I am pretty delighted with this piece.   The atara came out exactly as I had hoped. You can see much of it before it was sewn onto the tallit And here it is on the tallit.   I could not be more pleased. I did more work on Yoni’s tallit.I found a spool of army green thread and realized that rows of machine embroidery in the army green would be perfect. Things were going so well that I decided to add a decorative stitch to the edge of the  rock stripes. I forgot how the stitching will stiffen up the edge of the stripe in a really unpleasant way. I had of course chosen a stitch that was fairly dense.   I had a crazy amount of unpicking to do. Unpicking stitches is probably one of my least favorite activities. I would rather clean toilets. If there were a way to NOT unpick the stitching, I would have done it. Eventually, after several episodes of crappy re...