sarah in nyc

    This nasty blob on the back of my student’s jacket.   Got transformed into this. A cool half belt sewn into the side seams of the jacket, many thanks to my wise friend Loretta, who suggested the half belt to hide the ugly teacher caused blob.   My student loved the simple and elegant solution. Many thanks Loretta.   Our next project is making a dress for an American Girl doll. We are starting out with a pattern. I have a pattern book from when my daughter was into those dolls in a big way.  My student is learning from my early sewing bumbles. We are lining the bodice of the dress .  It’s a much less fiddly way to get a clean finish on such a small garment. the end result looks more elegant with less work.   The doll will end up with a Vegas worthy dress. I will post more images after our next lesson.

This afternoon I'm teaching a tallit making workshop for 11 year old kids and their parents. This is familiar territory for me. The hardest part of such a workshop for me is not teaching the text or keeping a group of both adults and kids engaged, but rather, trying to guess how big a tallit to make for the participants. Amazon.com Widgets Some kids at age 11 are at about their full height. Other kids spend their grade school years as peanuts and then sprout up like crazy  either around the time of their bar-mitzvah or in the years following the bar-mitzvah.  ( My youngest grew 18 inches the year after his bar-mitzvah and another foot the following year) I don't want kids to put in a whole lot of effort into a tallit what will look like a toy tallit by the time they have their bar- mitzvah. On the other hand, you don't want them to look like they are drowning in tallit at their bar-mitzvah. My solution is to more or l...

We have been more or less home bound since Sunday evening.   My son hasn’t had school all week. My husband has been unable to get to his office and there is no power in the building.  My husband and I have been taking turns using this computer. Both of us have been trying to work. I did massive amounts of laundry. At first I was worried that we might not have power or water at some point so was trying to get as much stuff done ahead of the crisis. Sunday evening was my building's annual Halloween lobby decorating. I coordinated the event.  We made ghost garlands out of  tissue paper. one family made garbage bag ghosts. There were a ton of kids working away, all hopped up on sugar. We also did cookie and cup cake decorating.  It was loud slightly chaotic but ultimately very productive and a nice bit of community building in my building. I also got to work on my niece's engagement gift. My niece just became engaged to the nephew of a long time client...

Last night I felt hugely grateful to be living right where I am.  We don’t have river views. Riverside Park  is a steep walk down hill.  Our building was built 100 years ago when buildings were built to last. The winds were ferocious last night.  The lights occasionally flickered and the building shuddered once or twice. We have power. We have lights and we have internet and we have lots of food in the house.   Our friends who live downtown are not as lucky. People who live in low lying areas of the city have really suffered.   I took a little walk today. Our building suffered just a bit of damage. A small bit of facing on the side of the cornice was sheared off by the wind. This tree in our back courtyard was uprooted. Luckily, all it damaged was a fence. It could just as easily have broken windows and hurt  some of our neighbors.   The building across the street lost a large piece of it’s cornice. Apparently, last night it w...

This fall I have been making good use of our slow cooker. I have been making lots of what I call “Poor People Soup”.  Basically it is a collection of meat bones , onions, carrots, parsnips and and perhaps cabbage or a can of crushed tomatoes. I put a collection of whole spices in a tea ball and let it all cook away. I have discovered that if you let the soup simmer away for two days the vegetables caramelize. The flavor becomes deep.  I started the soup last night before I went to bed. This morning I added two pieces of chicken to the soup. I suppose if I were more refined I would strain all of the vegetables out of the soup. Tonight’s company are people were are really comfortable with, so I am going to serve the soup in it’s unrefined version. Chicken is cooking away in the oven  made with lemons, basil black pepper and rosemary. I also have rice and hard wheat cooking away at the same time. I need to figure out a vegetable and dessert. Yesterday was a big baki...

required more basting than I have ever done in my life.  because I had embroidered the lettering on the same side as the embroidered letters, I had to flip the middle of the chuppah over. That’s easy to say, but much more complicated to do.   First I tea dyed one of the lovely tablecloths that came to me by way of Vivian.  I made some really strong tea, added it to hot water and then let the table cloth sit in the tea for about 20 minutes. I dried the cloth in the dryer.   The color was perfect. Here you see the cloth  that Danielle's great, great aunt embroidered over the tea dyed cloth from Vivian's grandmother.   After basting the two cloths together, I cut out the center of the cloth and sewed all of the raw edges. then I flipped the sandwiched cloths, hand basted two two together and then inset pieced from the tea-dyed cloth where things didn’t quite line up. I machine stitched all of the raw seams with a three stepped zig-zag.  Ye...

Last week my student and I met. She made this jacket. It’s  made out of a lovely wool that arrived in a Fabric Mart Mystery Bundle .   There is a cute collar on the jacket that we drafted together. Attaching the collar left a raw edge on the inside of the jacket. My student had run out of sewing steam. When I suggested covering the raw edge with ribbon that attached to the jacket with iron on mending tape…my student loved the idea. It worked. Unfortunately, I had left a bit of the iron on mending tape on my ironing board.  I pressed the jacket and fused the mending tape to the lower center of the back.  I got most of it up, but the jacket has an ugly blog on the back, and it was my fault. I felt terrible. My student felt awful, and probably really angry and me as well, but she was too polite to yell at me. This is the blob. The fuseable blob is 6 inches up from the ham and is just about in the middle of the back of the jacket.  During the wee...