sarah in nyc

  I made this rye bread. It was delicious and looked cute too. I added some cocoa t about 1/5th of the dough. I rolled the plain dough into a rectangle and the cocoa dough into a  messy rectangle, stacked the two and rolled them up. My husband who hasn't eaten bread with butter in years toasts the bread spreads it with butter and is very happy. I helped plant these earlier in the spring. Last weekend we saw some turkeys wandering around the cabin we are renting . I began work on a pillbox style kippah for a friend. You can see how I build up the design bit by bit. This vintage Swiss embroidered ribbon just came into my life. It's getting there... Now I need to start construction. A day or so ago I went downstairs to check the mail and I was go smacked by the light and the pretty shadows. Shabbat Shalom !

 Any of you who are familiar with Where the Wild Things Are  will be familiar with the phrase  In and out of weeks and through a year, that described Max's adventure in the land of the wild things. Nini sent me the key photos from her last summer's trip to Nova Scotia just about a year ago. I began by looking and looking at these photos and trying to figure out how to render this particular landscape in fabric.   While sometimes Nova Scotia has bright sunny skies.  So often, it is the fog that defines the place. I remembered walking with my Halifax born friend Shawna on a misty day towards the Hudson River.  It was a misty cool day. We were essentially walking through the fog. Shawna sighed and said, "Ahh, it's Halifax weather!".   The fabric for the main body of the tallit was chosen because it evokes the fog. I added more fog with oil paint sticks and with hand embroidery. This photo inspired the stripe of pines above the fog. Nini wanted to be ...

When I was little I spent a huge amount of time worrying about which of the three of us my parents loved the best. Childhood is full of rankings. A child is expected to come up with their favorite color or ice cream flavor for strangers. That question of who my parents loved best was a big part of my mental life as a small child.  Between  my own childhood and my own time being a parent I heard lots of different answers to that question of which which child is the favorite.. I knew that the commonly given answer of ," I love you all the same", was clearly a big lie that even a tiny child could see through. As a parent, I know that the right answer for me has always been , "I love you all differently.". What I mean when I say that is that each of my kids has some characteristics that I deeply love and feel strongly connected to. My older son was born with a double dose of empathy. When he was about five or so I couldn't find my son or his buddy Philip at synagogu...

 It has been hot this week.   How hot was it??? It was sooo hot that the pigeons that normally hang out on the street lamps on 96th street were all huddling in the shade to avoid the sun. Earlier in the week my husband and I visited an antique store. Had I endless room in my apartment I would have purchased this "Sew Mistress" toy sewing machine. It looks like it would actually work, My cousin recently mentioned that our great aunt had purchased such a machine for her. It worked so well that her father,  my Uncle Sol, made a set of kitchen curtains using the crank operated machine. I could see the Sew Mistress tackling such a job without too much trouble. Just in case you were thinking of purchasing a new toy sewing machine for a child. Just don't. The toy sewing machines made today will just make a child feel like a failure because they are so poorly constructed. The other thing I totally was lusting for at the antique store was  the left-most bracelet on this displ...