She began selling necklaces strung with mini-bagels on a dare from her husband. Bagelmania (and a career as a toy designer) ensued.
Judith Hope Blau, a painter whose accidental detour into bagel art — necklaces, napkin rings, wreaths and candleholders fashioned from, yes, bagels — led to a career as a children’s book author and illustrator and a toy designer, died on May 4 at her home in Eastchester, N.Y. She was 87.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said her daughter, Laura Paul.
In the early 1970s, every Thursday was B-Day for the Blaus, a family of four living in Westchester County. That was the day Ms. Blau and a friend with a station wagon picked up 1,000 or so bagels from a bakery in nearby New Rochelle. Back home, the haul was tipped into a bathtub to dry out.
Bagels, described by The New York Times in 1960 as “an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis,” turn stale after a single day — and they made a fine, firm canvas for Ms. Blau. She helped the process along by stirring them with her hand, so the ones on the bottom of the tub wouldn’t get moldy. “Fluffing,” she called it.
Once they were dried, Ms. Blau painted the bagels with smiling faces — she never painted a cranky bagel, The Times noted — helped by her daughter, who brushed in the whites of the eyes. Ricky, her son, pitched in by fishing out the rejects — the mangled or lumpy ones — and eating them. Lawrence Blau, her husband, who was a nuclear physicist, kept the books.
Once painted, the bagels were shellacked, tagged — “Don’t Eat Me” — and spread throughout the house to dry again. Mr. Blau once caught a bagel drying on the bathroom floor with his big toe and fell into an empty shower.
“There we were, living in a bagel factory in Eastchester,” Ms. Blau told a reporter in 1979. “My children, Laurie and Ricky, my physicist husband and I, once a serious painter, were totally preoccupied with preserving, painting, packing and selling hundreds of smiling bagel products.”
