sarah in nyc

Back when I was a kid,  there were certain questions that adults would always ask kids to make conversation. After a while you knew that you just had to have an answer prepared for the inevitable.   You had an answer for the favorite topic in school question.  The what do you want to be when you grow up question had fairly limited responses if you were of the gender that did not have a penis.   The color question, as in, “What is your favorite color?” Seemed always to be particularly fraught. Each of my older sisters had claimed one of the better primary colors as their favorites. One chose red, the other, blue. That meant that I had to choose from among the second tier colors. I claimed green as my favorite. That also meant that I got green in lollypop and M&M distributions. My father used to claim that black was his favorite color. As a small child I was horrified by that choice.  At that point in my life, I thought that black was the color of ...

Last Monday morning I took the bus to Boston to help take care of my mother. The seat I was sitting on on the bus was pitched forward so I had to spend the entire four and a half hours of the trip bracing my feet against the floor so I didn’t have to spend the trip sliding onto the bus floor.   By the time I got to Boston I was tired and cranky. While the Red Line  train line does have a South Station stop, both the  connection between the bus and subway , and the bus station  itself are so terribly designed that  by the time I get myself out to Brookline I feel too completely assaulted by design crimes that I  am apt to be really cranky by the time I get to my mother’s apartment. A long time ago, my mother coined the term, “ And that’s why God invented money.”, to explain why she, a normally really thrifty woman, would choose to do something expedient rather than thrifty.   Because God invented money, I took a taxi to my mother’s house fro...

  Yesterday, when I came home from services this wonderful bundle of fabrics was left for me in a Trader Joe’s paper bag.  I have no idea who left it for me.   Four of the fabric are wonderful old style batiks printed on heavy cotton. These sorts of batiks were easy to find during the 1960’s and ‘70’s and are hard to find in this quality these days. They scream summer dress to me in that Harvard Square circa 1972 fashion that is so dear to my heart.  I may need to make a leather and wood ponytail holder to go with the dress and forget about shaving my armpits for a few months to get the full look. The other two fabrics are a circa 1986 drapery print and a Brunchwig & Fils silkscreened vaguely  Chinese drapery print.   I don’t know who to thank for this treasure trove. If it was you, let me know.  Now I can dress like my older sister’s beyond cool history teacher from 11th grade. Will it be a tunic dress with bell sleeves? or a sleevel...

First the food. That’s chicken with chestnuts, brown mushrooms and potatoes and fennel. The chicken is so adorable looking that I will serve it whole and carve it at the table. I know it’s an autumnal combination, but it’s been chilly. Actually it’s what I think of as menopause weather from moment to moment the weather flip flops from being balmy to bone chilling. So a hearty taste will be nice for tonight. I’m, also serving a kale salad dressed with sesame oil and rice vinegar. I will add bits of cara-cara oranges and pecans before serving. As always I’m grateful to my older son for his input and insight. He will ask me how I plan to cook each of the elements of the meal and offer tweaks and suggestions. I realize that I do the same for him as he cooks. It’s nice to have this sort of a dialogue going about the meals that I cook. It just makes it all come out better. The time has come for me to make a dress to wear to my niece’s wedding. My sister, the mother of the bride, has...

  Yesterday, while rooting through the bags of  textile goodies from Vivian I found this sweet bit of embroidery.   This linen cloth is place mat sized.  This is the only piece like this in the treasure trove that Vivian gave me. I don’t know if it was part of a placemat set or if it was made as a dresser scarf. Either way, it’s pretty adorable.   I am not going to go into the larger political issues involved in using imagery from other cultures as decorative motifs.  I am going to leave that to the political theorists.   What I do find interesting culturally about this piece of embroidery is that is uses exactly the same colors and techniques as linens my mother used to call “Swiss Embroidery” ( captured from http://cdn101.iofferphoto.com/img/item/139/668/589/Bi1F.jpg ) It’s sweet work, nicely done.  It will appear on a surface in my house in the next few months. meanwhile it is starched and ready  for it’s time in ...

When I work on a piece I know more or less where I am going to end up, but I don’t always know exactly how I’m going to get there.  Working on this atara/tallit neckband  for my nephew-to -be was one of those cases.   I knew I had to edge the atara. I don’t have my nephew- to -be’s tallit here for  reference in terms of color. I  didn’t want the soft colors of the atara to appear to weak and washed out next to the light blue of the tallit.  I was also worried that if the blue on the tallit had a greenish cast then the combination would look weak and sickly.   I  decided to make bias strips of a nice smoky blue cotton velveteen that’s been in my stash for a long time. I sewed the bias binding binding onto the  atara using the diamond stich on my machine and gold metallic thread. The result was both physically strong as well as being visually strong. The stronger blue pulled the colors and composition  a bit out of balance. T...

The events of the last week had my head and my heart very firmly in Boston.  I don’t think that I had anything particularly wise to add to the conversation, and it seemed frivolous to write about anything else, thus the silence.   The week was a mix of the horrific, made palatable by seeing acts of courage and kindness throughout that week.   I was however working on various things during the week as I listened to WBR, the Boston NPR station streaming as I worked. As I said, my head and my heart were very much in Boston. My husband always tells me that I don’t warn him when I’m about to change topics which often leaves him confused.  I’m now changing topics.     Each year that I have hosted Seder, my mother has polished up this Seder plate and brought it with her. She would take it back home with her when she returned to Boston. I believe that it was a wedding gift from one of my parents’ friends. This year, she told my sister to leave t...