sarah in nyc

 I finished making the havdalah bags last night.  I was asked to make fifteen bags but I made an extra one for insurance purposes. Because whenever you don't plan time for errors you get a disaster at the eleventh hour. Because I planned for disaster none occured. I am now going to rant for a few moments. If you are a commercial tallit making establishment and post a comment that is a link to your store I will never post that comment. That kind of marketing is underhanded . I don't post on your site trying to drive business my way, don't do that to me. And my second rant. What's with the men I don't know telling me that I am pretty and bugging me to be their friend on Facebook?   Why do they think that being aggressive and asking me over and over is going to make me change my mind? I'm currently on lunch break while on jury duty.  I will post when I can.

 This has been a busy, busy week. Sunday began with the lovely task of tying tzitzit with Benny and his family. We met outdoors because Benny's mom is a wise woman and didn't want to risk Benny possibly getting exposed to Covid a week before his bar-mitzvah and turning the celebration into a super-spreader event. Before a client comes to pick up a project I am always a wreck worrying if they will be happy with the piece. Just because I am pleased with a tallit doesn't mean that my client or his parents will be pleased. I expended some of my anxious energy setting up a table and chairs in my building's courtyard. I wanted benny to see what the tallit looked like--normally I would drape the tallit on my dressmaking dummy. Benny's father served as our model. Benny was really pleased.  We sat down to tie the tzitzit. each family member took a corner. Benny was at first a little anxious if he could manage the knots. Benny's mom reminded him that he was familiar with...

 We switched our house back to Chametz-mode last Saturday night, so today is our first post-Pesach challah. It felt wonderful getting back to the really pleasurable job of kneading challah. Today, my Facebook feed was filled with photos of Schlissel challot.  A Schlissel challah is a custom to bake challah in the shape of a key to help open the gates of heaven on the Shabbat after Pesach. Or more properly, it is a Slavic Easter bread tradition to bake a loaf of bread in the shape of St. Peter's key. Just as I don't put a conifer in my house at Chanukah time to say, symbolize the wooden posts installed at the rededication of the Temple I don't bake such an iconographically Christian challah. So sorry folks, no Schlissel challah here.  I made a batch of two stranded challot. I made eight small challot rather than four big ones because it is just the two of us eating. Here is a visual on how to make two stranded challot. Roll out one strand of dough. I had rolled the dough i...

 Normally I am pretty good about posting about works in progress as they are progressing. I had spent so much time unpicking the messy substrate under the embroidered wings that the actual construction of the tallit took place around and between breaks from the mad cooking rush that is Passover. One of the really beautiful things about a woven tallit is how the stripes n the right and wrong sides of the tallit interact with one another when the tallit is worn. That dynamic interplay of stripes is as satisfying as a really lovely chord progression. Years ago when I first began constructing tallitot I used to create the stripes out of hemmed units of fabric that I then sewed together. I got that stripe interaction using that method. My main concern was sturdiness. While those tallitot WERE sturdy, they lacked in flowy drape--because the seams were bulky. Lately, I have been constructing tallitot slightly differently stitching the stripe elements to both the right and the wrong side o...

All parents make choices when they send their children to school. My parents chose to send us to an Orthodox day school that was a bit of a distance from our home. Our father was a Conservative Rabbi. They chose the school because they felt that there, we would get the best, the highest quality Jewish education in Boston. They weren't wrong about the Jewish education, but the experience a child has in school isn't just the book learning but is also about the complex social dynamics that take place in a classroom and in the schoolyard. Most of the kids who went to our school lived in a couple of neighborhoods. I didn't realize until I was an adult how much of my classmates' lives were also made up of the social life that takes place when you go to synagogue together, and hang out with one another on long Shabbat afternoons, or eat meals together. We lived far away. Our religious perspective was just different enough. I went through school feeling always not quite in bala...