sarah in nyc

  Several weeks after my mother’s 25th birthday, and my parent’s  marriage  she and my father moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia where my father was to serve as rabbi and my mother taught Hebrew school.   My parents were young, and smart and energetic, but they were also both of them in their mid twenties. My parents learned how to be adults from their congregants. There were several people who became real role models for my parents. I’m writing this because yesterday, Nancy and her family came by for a short visit. When my parents arrived in Halifax, Nancy was five or six.  My mother taught Nancy how to read Hebrew. Nancy’s parents both deeply influenced how my parents lived their lived. They were people whose counsel my parents trusted.   As a little girl I used to pore through my parent’s photo albums. The Halifax album was filled with photos from my parents personal life, but also photos from their professional lives. I loved the photos of the ...

Or perhaps I should re-phrase that as “ It’s a Small World After All”. Often the commissions that I’m working on and the food that I’m cooking are manifestations of similar ideas.   We tend to think of ourselves as Jews as either being Ashenazi or Sephardi. That is either our roots are in Central and Eastern Europe or we trace ourselves to the Middle East, North Africa or Central Asia after the the times of the destruction of the Temple. In the last few years I have been realizing more and more that those categories are far more permeable and flexible than I had been brought up to believe. While it is one thing to understand that the Ottoman Empire reached the gates of Vienna, it is another to finally get that our grandparents who lived in what on paper may have been part of the Russian empire , also were shaped by that easy access to Turkey, and Greece and Bulgaria and parts further East.   Earlier this year I read that even before the rise of Chassidism in the 17...

I love this building. First of all, this is one of the weirdest takes on a broken pediment I have ever seen. Usually a broken pediment has an elegant finished look. This one looks more like a busted pediment. I love how the two completely finishes on the two halves of the building just make this building look slightly surreal. I took this photo before Passover and had been trying to figure out how to include it elegantly in a post. When I took this photo it was still wintery out. The weather has been aggressively spring like for a day or two followed by a few days of bitter cold. The plants and flowers in the neighborhood are completely confused by the weather. The tulips on our block went immediately from being closed buds to the petals about to drop.   They reminded me of the iconic Andy Warhol  flower sink screens.

  I had received this bag as a gift. I loved the shape. It looked cool. The straw was scratchy and made the bag less than comfortable to wear.   The bag had no interior pockets. It also had no exterior pockets to hold a metro card. Several months ago I bought this fabric. It’s a Marc Jacobs quilted faux suede. I bought it at Fabric Mart for an amazing price . I wanted to copy the straw bag in the suede. I was afraid to cut into the Marc Jacobs fabric, as I only had a yard of it. This week I bought two more yards of the fabric at an even better price. I now was ready to go wild.     It took me a long time to get to it. It was the figuring out that had me paralyzed.   Today was the day to try it out. I had used the straw bag last night and was frustrated by it’s limitations.   I ended up with this. With a pocket for my metro card. With an interior pocket to hold random small stuff. With another pocket to hold business...

  After a long pause, it was time to get back to work on Y’s tallit. Above you see the sketch I had made for Y during our initial  meeting. You can see that the sketch is pretty, well sketchy. The point of the sketch is to give my client ( and me) a visual reminder of what the final tallit will look like.   One of my quirks about tallitot has come from my years of going to services. I tend to look around at the tallitot that the people who sit in front of me are wearing. In woven tallito the stripes read on both sides of the tallit. So when you flip the tallit over your shoulders the stripes on the top layers interact with the stripes on the lower layers. It looks great. If however you wear an appliqued tallit, the underside of the tallit is often distressingly white and naked looking. Clearly most tallit makers don’t share my horror of   blank bottomed tallitot.  I deal with my horror of the blank backed tallit by appliqueing and embroidering strip...

My friend Nancy is a frequent commenter on this blog. She also has her own sewing blog http://nancyksews.blogspot.com/   I always appreciate hearing what she has to say. A few days back, this post elicited this comment. Dear Sarah, I love the way you cook and sew! You just DO IT....me, I have to ponder, mull, change my mind about the fabric, read every step of the patterns....finally it gets done. Cooking, not so much. I just never know what to make, shall we get pizza? Eat the leftovers etc. More power to you! I'm too old to change but I do admire your work every day. Nancy First of all, that is a very sweet thing to say. But I think explaining how I sew will show how I actually am not that big of a risk taker. Like most people who are serious about sewing, I love beautiful fabric. I do know lots of folks who sew who collect lots of wonderful fabrics but are terrified to cut into any of it. I will admit that there are some fabrics in my stash that I have been afraid to cut i...

On one of the last days of Passover a friend and I were talking after services. We were talking about the sheer amount of work  that goes into creating  Passover in our homes.  My friend said that to her it seemed ironic that this holiday that celebrates redemption from slavery is often so difficult  for women who often do so many of the domestic tasks necessary to make Passover right. I have been thinking a great deal about this issue for the past several years. I realize that unlike most of the people I know, I earn my living doing physical labor. I’m not a lawyer, or a social worker or a writer or a college professor. I manipulate materials to create objects that get used. One of the hard things about celebrating Passover in Boston is that so often despite it's being called "the Spring festival" in the bible it is often still clod and raw. New York is far enough south that Spring begins during Passover. I took these photos today  in the block s around my ...