sarah in nyc

 Last weekend I bought myself a weekend pass to go to the lovely juried craft show at the  Crafts at the Cathedral  at St John the Divine, a pleasant walk uptown. You can browse all of the makers that are on the link.   I am just goong to suggest some fiber folks who deserve a closer look.Did I buy anything? No, I did not. No because I didn't ;ove so much of what I was looking at...but because I make so many of my own clothes. I did want to point out a few makers whose work I especially liked. https://www.reintsemadesigns.com/s/shop  If I were the owner of an art gallery, or the business manager of an arts organization, of the head of development in an arts organization I would buy all of my clothes here. https://www.kbeckerdesigns.com/collections/all?page=2#collection_root These clothes look so incredibly good in real life. They are the sorts of clothes that could be worn endlessly in a million different combinations by anyone. Think Eileen Fisher but fitt...

 There are times when I write these Food Friday cooking and baking posts that I feel like it is just a higher tech version of the phone calls my mother had with Marilyn, or Temmi, or Mildred or Rissy. Some of those phone calls were made with the purpose of getting a  particular recipe, but more often than not the recipe would emerge during a call that was about life. It was an era when people spent lots of time on the phone while they were ironing or cooking or cleaning.  I thought about my mother's friends as I put together today's challah dough. There are lots of ways to form challah. Today I decided to roll each loaf out  into a large rectangle   roll the flattened dough into a tight roll  Cut the rolls in two and then pull each strand until it was long. Then I began to braid each strand. There are lots of perfectly lovely ways to form a challah. Rolling the dough out with a rolling pin and then tightly rolling the flattened dough up into a jelly roll ju...

 While I have been working on Miles' tallit I have been trying to work out elements of Nini's tallit in my head at the same time. Nini's tallit will be evoking Nova Scotia. I have been stitching away  at the fog. I have been adding some stitching with silver metallic thread  to get  that sense of fog. One side of the tallit is nearly done and the other half is about halfway there. But often when I work on one part of a piece I am problem solving about the next bit of work that I need to tackle. That next bit of work is how to create the trees. These beautiful photos are nini's and she sent them to me so I could understand what exactly she was thinking of in the Nova Scotia landscape. My first memory of Nova Scotia was being driven from the airport to Halifax when I was five. Pine trees were part of my life in Massachusetts but the tall spindly looming pine trees that lined those roads were something else entirely. I have been thinking about how to create those trees ...

 There are times when the design for a tallit comes together in a quick hour. There are other times when a client and I will talk for months  or even years until the design for their tallit comes into focus. The design for Nini's tallit has come together over a long, long period of time.  If you think of each individual's life as being an orbit of sorts --there are some people who travel in nearly exactly the same orbit that we do. Nini and I have only been in the same physical space a few times but aspects of our lives have intersected over and over again over the course of our lives. Had we grown up in the same city, we surely would have been good, good friends. We share many beloved friends.  Nini actually spent the formative years of her childhood in Halifax and knew my dear friend Shawna. Although Nini moved to Philadelphian in middle school the place where she feels the most at one with herself and the most connected to God is in Nova Scotia.  So, Nini and...