sarah in nyc

and this is what is in my fridge. There are only four of us at home. This is a whole lot of food to get through before clearing out for Passover. Do you want any taboule? or some lentil salad? or humus? Perhaps some bread?

We fed lots of people. Our son did a wonderful job. The dress worked So did the boots There were no fights No one went hungry There were no disasters Everyone went home We have lots of food in our fridge and freezer I'm really, really tired

My friend Cindy Ann left a comment on yesterday's entry. She wanted to know how I came up with the idea for the dress that I'm wearing at my son's Bar Mitzvah. Probably the earliest source came from my years playing with Barbie. When my sisters and I used to get tired of the garments we owned that actually came with Barbie, we used to improvise dresses from tissues. ( We loved when our mother bought boxes of colored tissues which made for much more glamorous dresses than plain white) I remember cutting little holes for Barbie's arms so those dresses wrapped around her body. We usually tied them with hair ribbons or with a lace hankie . The second source for this dress is the diagrams for Miyake clothing that I found on the Vogue Patterns website. I love looking at the schematics of clothing patterns so I can understand how the garments are actually constructed. I remember being shocked at how simple the actual pattern was for a really complicated looking drapey coat. Tw...

During my daughter's winter break from college, I dragged her to the Museum of the City of New York to see an exhibit on Art Deco in New York. It was a sweet little exhibit. But inexplicably, in the middle of the exhibit was a selection of 1940's and '50's dresses. They were beautiful, but not Art Deco. One of the dresses in the exhibit was by the designer Valentina, a girlfriend of Greta Garbo . The dress was a mind blowingly simple white dirndl dress made out of wool gauze. I especially loved the deep ( maybe 18 inch) doubled hem. I l oved how pared down the dress was. I also loved how it looked entirely contemporary, even though it was about 60 years old. A few days later I found some wool gauze in black at Paron . I thought that it would be wonderful to make myself a wool gauze over dress to wear over a full slip. I thought that it would be a nice thing to wear at my son's Bar Mitzvah. My friend Jackie had gone to Vietnam over the summer and I asked he...

When it was time for my daughter to study for her Bat Mitzvah we hired a teacher to work with her. Either my husband or I could have taught her, but given where she was emotionally at the time, it seemed better to have her learn with someone else. When it was time for my older son to begin to study, I started to work with him with the assurance that if he wanted to work with someone who was not his mother, we would find him a teacher. We worked in little snippets of time early in the mornings. I don't think we could have found a teacher to show up for ten minutes at a time, at 7:00am. We worked well together. We have a fairly easy relationship.r When our youngest was 10 or so, my husband went to a charity auction. One of the items in the silent auction was Bar Mitzvah lessons with Jerry. Jerry runs an alternative Hebrew School and has prepared hundreds and hundreds of kids for their B'nai Mitzvah. my husband bid on the lessons and won. Jerry was one of the people that helped...

This morning was my son's "real" or weekday bar mitzvah. ( Not that the one that will be taking place this Shabbat ISN'T real --just that the more intimate setting of morning services feels like a much lower octane easier to focus on event ) My husband, son and I went to services together. As we got there, our friend Meyer was there with his video camera, ready to catch the images of us walking into the chapel. The day after our son was born, my parents came to help us out. My father went to morning services and invited Meyer to come to my son's Bris . Meyer took this invitation as a continuing obligation to my son. We have been so lucky that Meyer decided to take on this role in the life of my son and our family. Everyone should have a relative like Meyer. We aren't related by blood, but my father's off hand invitation has created that lovely relationship. My husband helped my son put on his t'fillin . Yes, I teared up hearing them both reciting ...

When I work on several pieces at a time, there is often a relationship between them that is not always immediately obvious to me. Over the last several months I have been working on the Torah Mantle in memory of my father and also on my son's tallit . A tallit needs a bag. Today I began work on the tallit bag. I don't like when things are, in the words of a very swish party planner that I met in a fabric store with his client, "too matchy matchy ". This tallit has all of those willow leaves on the stripes. I looked through one of my bag of scraps and found a piece left over from my father's mantle a rich deep blue cotton velveteen. I cut yet another leaf stencil out of an index card and brushed yellow and gold Shiva Pint stick through the stencil. (I did pay attention in kindergarten and remember the blue + yellow make green ). a detail of the stencil for the tallit bag I was very happy with the results.. You see just a detail here. And then I smacked myself ...