sarah in nyc

I have loved working on this tallit.  jean is an adult who decided that she wanted a tallit, not for any external reasons like reaching a particular age but because of her own careful thoughtful decision. Amazon.com Widgets The making of this tallit has taken a long time. Usually I am a fast decision maker. But in working on this tallit for Jean it has helped me to do all of my decision making in the careful and thoughtful way that she does. Like Jean, this tallit is deceptively simple when you first look at it. But also like Jean, the more interesting the tallit gets the longer you look at it. Like Jean, the quiet side of the tallit faces outward, never the less you see the glimmerings of the flashier side through the quiet front of the tallit. You see a bit of the lining turned towards the outside of the tallit. I could look at this tallit all day. I had originally thought that just painting the letters for the atara would be sufficient.  But...

This week has been a week of terrible news in the world.  I had invited my dear friend S and her husband. My daughter and her boyfriend are joining us as well. It will be good for all of us to be together. Amazon.com Widgets I had already bought the brisket for tonight. This morning as I mixed together the coffee and spice rub  for the three slabs of beef  my husband was surprised by the sheer volume of spices that go into the rub. I assured my husband that it was not an excessive amount and is the reason that the beef he eats around here  tastes so good. After the beef was cooked I pulled it put of the baking pan and then  I added water, the dregs of a ketchup bottle, mustard, pomegranate molasses and some liquid smoke to the the dried out dregs in the bottom of the pan. I stirred up the dried up cooking juices and ended up with this. Then I put the meat back into the pan to rest and cool before being sliced. Yes, it tastes as good as it looks...

This book  is one of the most brilliant and thought provoking books on pattern drafting and garment design that I have ever read. It's dense. It's a doctoral dissertation and it has gotten me completely obsessed.  If you download the sample of the book on Googlebooks you get the whole book.  Rickard Lindqvist has figured out how to cut complicated garments out of one piece of fabric. Some of the basic tunic -type garments I totally understand, and will probably replicate but when he shows a diagram of what at first glance looks like a conventional men's suit jackets that is made using this method, my brain starts to explode. The jacket is beautiful...and looks like a normal men's suit jacket...except there are no shoulder seams.  The garments are made to work with the movements of the body.  If you aren't into sewing or garment construction just forget you read this. If you are into garment construction prepare to have your head explode and have y...

Yesterday my sister went back to the house we grew up in. While we were cleaning out my mother's apartment my sister had found a batch of envelopes my parents had printed with our return address. She also found the embosser with our return address. The embosser was a heavy metal contraption that had a satisfying feel in the hand as you pressed our return address onto the back flap of an envelope. My mother gave me that job back in the day when my parents sent out lots of new year cards. Amazon.com Widgets When we found the envelopes and the embosser my sister thought that she would bring them to  the people who currently live in the house. Yesterday my sister completed that mission.  Last night my sister called me with a description of all of the ways that our old house was changed and improved.  The family who lives there now is lovely and I thought I would send them some photos of us and the house...and I pulled down my box of 1960's photos and decided to shar...

Wednesday night I thought I was joking around with my youngest. I ended up hurting his feelings. I felt awful and left him an apology note for him so he could find it at breakfast. I Amazon.com Widgets I know that sometimes it to let someone know you are truly sorry, words aren't enough. I decided to show my son that I was really contrite by making something  that he really loved. I made spinach noodles. I then thought that my son would really love them if I turned the noodles into ravioli. So I did. I filled the noodles with black pepper spiked goat cheese. It was a lot of work. No, I don't own a pasta machine. I just kept rolling and re-rolling that noodle dough until it was all filled with the goat cheese. By the time I was done I really had gotten the process down and the ravioli were thin and elegant. The ones I had made early in the process were far less elegant. My son got home when I was nearly done. He thanked me for the note He gave me a hug. he to...

A couple of days ago  this dress showed up on my Facebook stream. It's from one a grown up version of those Chinese websites that show really inexpensive clothing for women. I was smitten with the dress. I loved the  slightly odd colors. I adored the shape. I visited the site and looked at the image a few times.  Then every website I visited showed ads featuring this dress. My Facebook feed included images of the dress. I started thinking about the dress a lot...a whole lot.  I suppose that if I didn't sew I would have been forced by the sheer power of suggestion to shell out the $99 and buy the dress. Instead I thought about the dress and figured out the basic shape. I recognized that this is essentially a rounded variation of the wide-side dresses that I keep making, mostly because I am a wide-sided girl. I had a length of fabric in a similarly weird color that my daughter had gotten as a freebie for me at one of her previous jobs. I am going to pr...

Today is my mother's birthday. Amazon.com Widgets In her honor I am posting some photos of her from the grand tour of Europe she and my father did in 1955. When my parents got married in 1953 their honeymoon consisted of a couple of days in Atlantic City (they took the bus there) and a few days visiting friends at Camp Ramah in Connecticut. Two years later they decided to do  the sort of honeymoon they might have done if either of them had wealthy families. Their financial situation hadn't changed all that much. But my mother decided that they should live off of my father's salary and bank her Hebrew school teacher earnings so they could do this grand tour. This was a decision that gave both of them a great deal of joy.  They stayed in fancy hotels in London, Paris, Rome and all over Israel.  They spent a week in each of the European cities and a month in Israel.  My parents ran into an old friend at the base of the Eiffel tower. He probably...