Category Archives: Fine Craft

Can someone PLEASE turn off the wind??  I’m not sure what is worse: the buffeting about or the noise.  Have you ever lived with  howling wind for a full month, nonstop??  It sounds like the hounds of hell riding straight through me.  Sometimes at night it sounds like horses galloping right on the deck above our heads, and that makes me think of those awful wraith things in Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy.

On the bright side, this boat sure is sturdy.  It has taken all the wind being hurled at it with a fair degree of grace.  On old Pandora we would have been heeling at anchor or at dockside.  New Pandora seems to take all this in stride and stays quite stable.

We had a rip roaring sail from Nassau to Over Yonder Cay on Thursday.  Bob loved it, and I tolerated it.  The wind was behind our beam (the mid-section of the boat) which makes for a pretty comfortable point of sail.  But the consistent 28 mph winds with higher gusts did not make it an easy day for me.  At least I did not get seasick, but I certainly could not do any handwork.  In all that wind, which was gusting over 30 mph quite often, new Pandora only heeled about 10-12%….amazing!

The day before we motored to Nassau in flat waters, about 60 miles from Great Harbour Cay in the Berries.  Bob did some quick provisioning at the American-style Fresh Market before we went out to dinner at Luciano’s, which has now become a tradition for us when we have to stop in Nassau.  Neither of us likes to stop in Nassau. In my case I’d say that arriving by boat in a large city is just not as appealing as arriving in a small town, or better yet, a remote location.  Cities just have too much hubbub for the cruising life style….but maybe that’s just me.  Nassau also has seen more crime in the past couple of years, which puts me on my guard.

The sail from Nassau to Over Yonder Cay was about 75 miles, and new Pandora raced here with speeds ranging from the high 8’s to mid 10s (mph).  This is a lot faster than any of our previous boats.  Bob just loved it…

Here is Pandora looking good on the dock at Over Yonder.

Yesterday in the latest gale, I stayed onboard all day and tried to be creative.  I made bread and yogurt.  The yogurt was my first attempt since back in the 70s when I had one of those electric yogurt makers by Salton–do you remember those?  Yogurt is not something easily found in the Bahamas, and milk will get scarcer and scarcer until there is none at all in Cuba, so I thought I’d attempt making it again, this time with irradiated box milk.  I was pretty convinced that it would not work, but voila!  It did!

I also spent much of yesterday going over the chapters I’ve put together for the Archie Brennan book.  I know I never talk about it, and everyone must assume by now that it’s a defunct project.  But I’ve been lurching along, and it is starting to shape up into something.  I am still quite smitten with this project, and there has actually been some very good progress–in my humble opinion!

I realize now I haven’t mentioned that I’ve worn my acid green t-shirt, newly adorned with tatting, a couple of times!  No one has commented on it–surely that’s a lack of boaters’ understanding anything about handwork, and not that it’s not adorable.

This is more accurate color.

  I made quite a bit of progress of my newest tapestry before I decided to UNweave all of it.  I’ve started again and am almost back to where I’d been when I decided to start over. Sheesh…

There is a lot going on at Over Yonder Cay even when there are no guests staying here.  Everyone works very hard to keep this place going–and to keep it being one of the most stunning spots anywhere.

Yesterday the mail boat arrived with lots of provisions…. the food must have come from the US because I’ve never seen so many beautiful vegetables and fruits in all of the Bahamas.  The produce came in crates!  A crate each of asparagus, mangoes, lemons and limes, cauliflower….

Then a seaplane arrived with a number of other provisions, including some kind of big pneumatic drill thingy…. It landed in the water right near us and drove up a ramp to stop right next to us onshore! Customs and Immigration arrived to make sure that everything had been properly invoiced.  Hmm…

We invited the couple we met two years ago, Ethan and Jaime, to come for dinner last night.  This time they brought their newborn son with them.  What a thrill to hold a baby after so many years.  He is a beautiful baby, and so mild mannered.  He let me hold him with barely a whimper at leaving his mom’s arms.  Jaime’s mother is visiting the island right now from her home in Long Island.  I enjoyed talking to her, Long Island being just the tip of the iceberg of what we have in common !  I hope we will see her again sometime in our own stomping grounds.  It was a very enjoyable evening for Bob and me.

This is a terrible photo, but I have to share it…. there is nothing like holding a baby!

Today we will take a walk around the island and then have dinner in the pavilion where we had a meal two years ago with Rob and Kandice.  I’m looking forward to that, especially if the winds die down as they are supposed to do.  And I’m hoping to see a lovely sunset (the pavilion is on the western side of the island with a lovely beach) without having my eyelashes ripped off.  Ever hopeful..

I’ve been making good progress on the second little tatted trim.  I had initially thought I would put it on a periwinkle, boat neck t-shirt I have with me, but I don’t think the color changes in the tatting thread work as well as I initially thought.  I have a lime green linen tank top onboard that I think will better.  So that’s the plan for now.

I’m a bit tempted to raid the fine cotton threads I brought with me to give to the bobbin lace maker in Cuba.  I’d like to try tatting on a smaller scale.  I’ll try to resist that temptation.

It was such a wonderful experience to arrive in Great Harbor Cay to soft warm breezes and brilliant sunshine. We had a couple of days of magnificent sunrises and sunsets—just what I needed. Since then it’s been gale force winds and ominous skies. Offshore the winds have been very high indeed, around 70 mph. Numerous friends have written to tell me about the cruise ship that got stuck in these winds and had to confine all passengers to their cabins while the ship returned to the US.

So, after getting somewhat used to this violent weather and calming down that Pandora was not going to rip herself right off the dock, I have picked up some projects again. I am about three rings and chains from finishing my little tatted lace trim. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to sew it to my t-shirt. Fingers crossed on that.

Yesterday, I took my copper pipe loom ashore to warp it (far too bouncy onboard for such a task). Bob rigged up a brilliantly technical, Rube Goldberg arrangement for clamping the edge of my loom to a picnic table. It involved two clamps, a length of webbing with a small clasp at one end such as is used for tying things to the roof of a car, and then a length of plain webbing and length of line (nauticalese for rope).

Can you see that Bob attached one clamp to the picnic table and then used the 2nd clamp to attach the corner of the loom to the first clamp.  So clever…. To minimize the torquing of the loom he has the car webbing running from the long bar of the 1st clamp to the other end of the picnic table.  The 2nd webbing is bracing the bottom corner of the loom to the picnic table.It was quite an engineering feat, and in the end, I was able to warp the loom all by myself while Bob walked to the market on the island. With my spool of seine twine in a bucket and tensioned by going over the brace of a picnic table nearby, I was able to use one hand to keep the tension on the warp while making wraps of warp with the other hand. I was done in less than hour!

All finished warping.  Then I sat down for a bit to space the warp threads evenly and weave a header that will support the beginning of the woven tapestry.  Does it look cold?  It certainly was!  The wind was blowing about 30 mph and the resultant wind chill was very un-tropical!

Here is the cartoon I’ll be using for this project. It’s the final line from one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, and it happens to be a favorite with our younger son as well. This tapestry is for him. In this photo I am measuring for possible border sizes.

Meanwhile, in my inbox yesterday I found a message from a friend alerting me to a post on Weavetech that she knew I’d be interested in reading. Now that internet is not a ‘given’ for us I have dropped the daily digest format, so I would never have seen this post without the ‘heads up!’ from my friend.

It turns out there is a new book out by Oxford Press about two subjects very dear to me: ancient Greece and weaving. Being a Greek student in college is what led me to weaving in the first place– 40 years ago. It was the connection between text and textile that brought me to weaving, and now 4 decades later a few people are looking at the connections between the words for various parts of early Greek ships and words used in weaving terminology. And now that I spend such a great deal of time living onboard my own little vessel (though not a ship) I am naturally curious to learn more about these findings.

The book is originally in German, and published by an English publisher (Oxbow) with a division in the US.  You can find it online here.  Surely it must also be available in English, especially since the title is translated –I am certainly counting being able to order an English translation.

Weben und Bewebe in der Antike: Materialitat–Reprasentation–Episteme–Metapoetick
(Texts and Textiles in the Ancient World: Materiality–Representation–Episteme–Metapoetics)
Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer (Author)

What I got to read, through the post on WeaveTech, is an article taken from the book, written by Marie-Louise Nosch and published on a website called www.academia.edu

Though I could not find the article by searching that site (maybe you will have better luck), the woman who posted on WeaveTech sent me a pdf. I’d like to post it here, but will first find out if I need permission for that. Stay tuned. It is a compelling study of the words for various parts of a sailing and rowing ship being the same as words used in both spinning and weaving. Since textile production is an older technology, it is presumed that the words used in ship building and  sailing terms were borrowed from textile terms, due to textile’s prominent connection to ships, ship building, and the act of sailing or rowing.

And on a calmer day Bob and I took a walk on the pristine beach at Great Harbor Cay.

Life took a strange and dark turn 2 weeks ago, and I left Florida to fly home.  I went home to be with my oldest friend as she entered a very dark period of her life.  She has lost someone very dear, someone who was dear to me as well.

During the past weeks I have watched my friend navigate very troubled waters with a strength and grace I did not know she has.  You can always learn something new about anyone, no matter how long you’ve known them.  She has become an inspiration for me.  Life throws unspeakable challenges at us, but I’ve learned a lot from my friend’s deep, still waters.

Along the way I’ve finished reading The Paper Garden, a biography of the 18th c. female artist, Mary Delany.  The author, Molly Peacock, was known more for her poetry than her prose, until she wrote this book.  The book is so popular now that the British Museum has had to limit access to Mary Delany’s paper collages in order to preserve them from the sudden rise in people requesting to see them.

My friend has been an artist since before I met her.  Growing up together, she painted and drew while I wrote things and dabbled in handwork.  Later she began sculpting and got her fine arts degree in that medium.  This quote from The Paper Garden makes me wonder where my friend’s artwork will go next:

Black pigment is made from charred organic matter—and that includes burnt bones. This chilling fact contributes to the black background of Mrs. D’s Rosa Gallica… Not that burnt bones necessarily produced the pigment that Mrs. D. used to create the black backgrounds of her flowers—her pigment could have been made from tar, pitch, lampblack, pine soot, anything charred to get a noir so deep it looks as if it came from the mouth of Hades. But whatever the composition of the dry crystals she ground with a mortar and pestle, then mixed with liquid and adhesive, its source is something burnt. Carbon. Organic. Ashes. Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don’t think it is. But art is a poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.

So, for me, regular life begins to lurch along once again.  I am back in the Bahamas with Bob, in a beautiful spot that we have not visited before called Great Harbor Cay.  When we left the harbor for a short sail yesterday, three dolphins found us and played in our bow wave.

The sunsets have been stunning, the Bahamians are the friendliest people I have ever met, the cruisers have been pretty friendly too, and Bob is letting me rest.  The days are warm and slow.

My biggest wish is that my friend could switch places with me.  I would take a couple weeks of her grieving and the growing responsibilities she has taken on to care for others in her family, while she could spend some time here– healing.  Life is so thoroughly unfair….

The past few days have brought some nice surprises in meeting new friends and reconnecting with old friends.  A woman who sometimes leaves comments on this blog let me know that she arrived in Ft. Pierce on her boat.  We just missed each other last year, and this year we almost missed each other again.  Bob and I had already left Ft. Pierce, but as luck would have it, we had to return to revisit the yard that did some work on Pandora that did not get finished.  After a half day there we decided to spend a night at the marina where Laura is spending the winter.

Laura is a weaver who also writes a blog called Laura’s Loom, where she chronicles her weaving and living aboard their 44′ SeaRay each winter. The tapestry weaving community might be an even smaller world than the sailing community, so I should not have been surprised to learn that Laura knows Don Burns (from the Wednesday Group) and had taken a class with him years ago.  When I visited Laura on her boat Dream Weaver I found her spinning some handpainted silk roving on her sweet Hansen electric spinner.  That gave me quite a pang that I left my spinner and some new silk roving at home.  Sigh…

That evening she and her husband stopped by our boat and I had a great time learning more about Laura’s weaving getting to know her and her husband a bit.  I don’t really want to show this photo, where for some reason I am wearing the ugliest shirt I own!  Egads!

 Yesterday morning I met another Wednesday Grouper, Rita, who spends her winters down here.  She and I were the only groupers who did not make it to last week’s WG reunion.  We commiserated a bit over that, but mostly just enjoyed catching up with each other.  Rita recently finished a wonderful tapestry for her granddaughter — the New York City skyline at sunset in beautiful oranges and golds, with her granddaughter leaping over it in a bright red dress and black Chuck Taylors with red shoe laces!  It’s a fun piece—sorry I don’t have the image!  You’ll just have to trust me on that!

Then last night we had old friends from New Jersey onboard for dinner.  Bob used to work with Linda, before she retired and moved down to Florida with her husband.  Now that Bob has also retired we try to see them each year as we head south.  It was a beautiful night, though a tad breezy, for watching the sunset behind West Palm Beach and then to see all the lights come on in the buildings.  It was a dramatic sight! –although this image came from the internet, not our camera.  Good wine, good conversation and a stunning view made for a great evening.

This morning I visited my favorite fabric store on the ICW–Mac Fabrics in West Palm Beach.  What a shop!  I had a great time there last year, which resulted in a tote bag that I take everywhere.  This year the plan was to find fabrics for new throw pillows for new Pandora.  I love what I’ve put together–only possible at a place this great!

The small monk’s belt weave will be used for the piping on both fabrics.

As  I write this Bob is buried in the back ‘workshop’ of Pandora, storing all the things he’s bought over the past couple of weeks.  We have a replacement part for just about everything onboard—from engine pieces to hoses for the sinks, filters for every item that has filters, belts—you name it.  It’s a lot of stuff and everything has its place.

Tonight we will have dinner in my favorite place along the entire ICW—a French bistro called Pastiche.  I’m sure it will be the best dinner of our whole trip because it always has been!  Bon Appetit!

In the serendipitous way that living onboard can be, Bob overheard a woman talking about cruising in Cuba last spring while he was in the marina laundromat a couple of days back.  You just never know what you’ll find when you go ashore in a cruising community.

The woman’s name is Jules, and she and her husband have cruised the world in their Ingrid 38’ ketch named Bounty from their homeport in New Zealand.  They are interesting people (obviously!) and generously willing to share their knowledge with us as we make plans for Cuba. YET it’s never a good thing when Bob meets people who have done such extensive sailing.  Look out!

Jules and her husband Gary visited us that evening and carefully went through our charts of the southern coast of Cuba, giving us valuable information on various harbors and how to fit into Cuban culture while ashore.  There were some significant things that differed from what we have read.  There is nothing like information from people with first hand experience!

On the other hand, there is a lot of scary stuff (Bob would say ‘exciting’) hurtling toward us.  Where do I begin??  Like the Bahamas, we will only approach a shoreline in daylight hours with the sun high overhead.  This is good news to me because I really don’t like night sailing.  Even so, there will be a fair amount of night sailing—just not when we go into harbors.  Ugh.  The swells will be large, but the wind should be mostly on our backs, which is more comfortable than other directions.

We will need to be tucked into good harbors at night because Cuba is a mountainous country, with katabatic winds at night–quite strong katabatic winds.  (from the Greek: katabaino – to go down– is the generic term for downslope winds flowing from high elevations of mountains, plateaus, and hills down their slopes to the valleys or planes below.)

And speaking of winds–we have heard from good friends who have already crossed over the the Bahamas that there have been terrible winds there lately.  In particular, there was a cold front earlier this week that brought sustained winds of 105 mph through an area of the Exumas.  Our friends were anchored between Great Exuma and Stocking Island where the winds were 65 mph.  A number of boats were thrown ashore and badly damaged in this blow.  I was horrified to learn about this.  We’ve had some bad winds there the past two years, but nothing like this! At least there are protective harbors in Cuba, unlike in the Bahamas.  So—we will want to be well tucked in each night, or well offshore.  I’m hoping for the former!

Also, we will need to be sensitive to situations onshore.  Sometimes we will be welcomed and sometimes not.  We need to read the signs of whether we should be in a particular shop buying items that the Cubans want to buy or whether we’ll be welcome to eat in particular restaurants that are for the locals.  I’m so sensitive in this regard that I often over react.  I’m certain that Bob and I will run into differing impressions when these situations arise.  All in all, Jules and Gary gave us a wealth of advice and information.

A sobering bit of info is that our visas, which will only be good for 30 days, really cannot be extended.  We have to leave Cuba for at least 24 hours in order to get a new visa for another 30 days.  Since it’s impossible to sail the coast of Cuba in only 30 days we will have to face this dilemma.  I was hoping that we could just anchor off the mainland someplace safe, but that is not acceptable.  We need to check out of Cuba and check into another country to prove that we left.  The most obvious choices from the southwestern end of Cuba are the Caymans or Jamaica.  Either of these will involve another overnight sail in big ocean.  Can you imagine the kind of dreams I had last night?

So the next few days to a week will be focused on finishing up our repairs and provisioning.  High on my list is getting my cartoon sorted for my next tapestry.  I am going to weave the final line from a favorite Robert Frost poem called “Mowing.”  The culmination of that poem is “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”  This is moving to me on so many levels, and I envision that weaving this phrase will be quite enjoyable.  The piece will go to my son Chris when it’s finished, so I asked him to work on the font and the spacing of the letters.  After trying a couple of fonts, we both decided on Adobe Caslon.  Here is a small version of it.

This is what it look like printed out full size, spread out on the floor at Staples in Vero.  Don’t you like Bob’s foot for scale?

I made a little sample of the text in a different font some time ago.

In the real piece the background will be lots of blended neutral colors woven in small shapes.  I hope that will have an interesting visual effect, as well as being interesting for me to weave.  I hope to get warped soon!

It is now Saturday morning, and there is a large farmers’ market here in Ft. Pierce, so we’re off to check that out.  We’ve been told it’s the largest, and best, market in the state.  It takes place every Saturday all year long.  Also, it seems we had a new guest onboard last night:  a raccoon.  That’s a first!

I’ll end with this silly photo Bob took of me yesterday as we walked around Ft. Pierce. I could have fun with my own jewelry store!

This is the end of our first week onboard, and I am beginning to get used to boat life once again.  It was a HOT New Year’s in Vero Beach, which is a very odd experience for us!  We left our family in Baltimore on the very day that cold weather hit the northeast, where our part of Connecticut had its first snow.  This is the first year that I won’t see any snow, unless there is still some around when I return in May—unlikely!

Some hot scenes from Vero Beach…

New Year’s Eve lunch at Cobalt, the restaurant in the Kimpton Hotel that looks out at the Atlantic–quite a luxurious spot for a New Year’s Eve lunch.  I had no interest in going out to dinner because that would entail a late night dinghy ride back to the boat in a dark harbor.  It gives me the shivers to think about drunken dinghy drivers in an unfamiliar harbor.  I chose lunch!

Traditional holiday decorations look rather out of place down here to me.

But there are plenty of lovely sights to see, like resurrection ferns which are flourishing right now since there has been plenty of rain.

 Along one of the streets we walk  we saw these large shrubs in bloom.  What are they?

 I’ve spent some time arranging our things, especially Christmas gifts from our kids that I simply could not leave behind, in order to make our new Pandora look homey.

After 20 years of celebrating New Year’s Eve with our good friends Kari and Gerhard our current celebrations have not been nearly as fun and interesting.  Change is inevitable, and I’m not saying we didn’t have a very nice evening this year….I just couldn’t help also feeling such a fondness for our past New Year’s gatherings with dear friends.

During our second day here we visited a nursery and farm stand in Ft. Pierce called Nelson Family Farms where I bought some herbs and a pink geranium that Bob planted together in a window box. Nelsons is now my new favorite plant nursery in this area.  There were so many choices of plants, and the fruit and veggie offerings on display were really tempting–I wanted to buy way more than we could store in Pandora’s galley.  One thing I found really tempting was chick peas still in their seed pods.  I’ve never seen that before!

I bought a phalenopsis– a hybrid color break white/magenta, and a rosemary plant in its own pot since it needs drier conditions than the other herbs (parsley, chives and thyme) that I wanted together in the window box.  Along with these I also have some paper whites from home that were a gift from my friend Tina.  So we have quite a bit of garden going for a boat!  It makes me happy, and most of all I am always amazed at how quickly things grow in warm, maritime conditions–and how sturdy they get after a week or so in strong breezes.  It will only take a few weeks before I will be able to harvest as many herbs as we need everyday.  At home it would take from early May ’til mid-July before I could do that.

To bring a little holiday cheer onboard since it was not yet New Year’s, Bob picked some greenery with red berries from an empty lot, along with some long stemmed white begonias.  Rather festive–though certainly not in the vein of traditional ‘northern’ Christmas decorating.  We tried hard to come with something that would NOT  look as silly as a red bow and bells on a palm tree!

To put a fine point on the kind of slow internet we cruisers experience, I’d like to explain that every photo I included in this post took from 20 – 30 minutes to upload.  Then some of them just failed entirely and had to be redone.  One of them–the window box planter– has uploaded sideways, and I’m far too exhausted to fix it at this point.  I started this post at 8 am, took a 1 1/2 hour break to go out to lunch, and it is now somewhat after 4 pm.  Really, I wonder why I bother!  It’s got to be my maniacal stubbornness.

For this last photo, when I truly thought I would lose my cool waiting, I decided to untangle a mess of size 20, 6-cord cordonet that I’d like to use for a project.  Because of the high twist it had tangled into quite a mess.  How’s that for manical??  While highly frustrating with the internet I chose to use my downtime doing another chore that was equally highly frustrating…. For most of the time I was detangling it looked like the detangling event would win over the uploading-photo event.  At the last moment the photo won, and thank heaven, because I might have cried.

I have more news but no more patience.  So until I recuperate enough for another frustrating, slow internet moment I’ll stop here.

P.S. I fixed the window box photo.  Whew!

This evening I am celebrating that I finished winding on the warp for my next project: fabric with JOY’s Almaza in quite a vibrant colorway.  The warp is muted shades of colors from the cool side of wheel–somewhat greyed blues and purples, with an occasional stretch of an almost bright pink.  I wound 16″ of this in 2″ sectional pieces, 6 yards long. The vibrancy will come when I add the very bright peach painted weft.

I did encounter a problem–due to my hasty math.  I have three hanks of this colorway and should have made the warp 5 yards long in order not to exceed my 3,000 yards of materials (each hank is 1,000 yards long).  However, in my excitement to get started, I left my warping wheel set at 6 yard length.  Ahem….  I realized my mistake after the first 2″ section was wound.  I quickly revisited the math and saw that I would come up 456 yards short!  Yikes!  I quit for the day then and decided to sleep on it….

My warp would be narrower than I needed for fabric.  I wanted fabric 16″ wide for my project.  I was only going to get 14″ now since every thread was a yard longer than it should have been.  When I woke up the next morning the first thing I thought about was adding some single colored warp threads to get the full width I needed.

456 threads out of a total of 3,456 is 13% of the warp.  I decided to add these threads to the second back beam on my AVL dobby and then mix them evenly into the main warp when I thread the pattern.  I need an additional 72 threads added to the 504 threads already wound on.  The solid color threads are medium grey and, as I mentioned, will constitute 13% of the total warp.  I hope it will look good!  It was my best guess on how to get the width I need!

By the afternoon I had the  the smaller warp on the supplemental beam–just 12 threads each in six sections.  Since tomorrow is my last day here, and I have plenty to do to close up this house ’til next May, I will have to leave threading ’til I return.

The weave structure I’ve chosen is an overshot lace that I found in the book 60 Scarves for 60 Years from the Weavers’ Guild of Greater Baltimore. It was designed by Carol Bodin especially to use with a painted warp.  Her project uses a solid color weft, so I am really looking forward to seeing how my project will work with a painted weft in an entirely different colorway….it will certainly be an exciting project to come home to!

After bringing both warps around their back beams and putting in the lease sticks I tidied up my studio so it will entice me to get to work when I return.  Bob and I headed out for our last walk along the CT River until spring.  It is the first cold day of the season here, and the sky was a clear winter blue with large fleecy clouds.  Two sights surprised us.  First, there were two big draft horses with an open carriage on one of the quiet residential roads that leads to the river.  I guess these horses were giving carriage rides in the center of town earlier in the day.

And a last good bye to the sheep who live on the corner of the street that leads to the river.  They aren’t too sure about Bob and me, so every time we try to take their picture they generally run for cover into the barn! All our photos show them running away!

We’ll be running away ourselves on Monday.  Future posts will look much more tropical.

Each year the quest for 10 sheep presents is never far from my mind.  My sheep group has been meeting for 37 years now, and I have been a member for about half that time.  The group has renamed itself a number of times, but the most colorful name is the “Flockettes.”  As the years have passed we have now become rather good sleuths at finding sheep Christmas cards and sheep wrapping paper and ribbon.  I kid you not, this is major holiday sheep hunting and can make or break my mental stability!

So let’s start with the sheep tableau at the porch door to my house. They are a recent gift from my good friend Susan, who is not a member of the sheep group.  She just knew how much I would enjoy this little flock.

One of the most popular gifts for our sheep group is tree ornaments.  Most of us now have a ‘sheep’ themed Christmas tree somewhere in our houses.  Our mantles, front doors, and dining room centerpieces are usually based on sheep.  After 37 years of getting 10 presents each year we have a LOT of sheep!

This year, as Thanksgiving approached, I was getting fairly nervous that I still did not have my sheep presents OR any  appropriate sheep wrapping paper and ribbon.  What’s a sheep lover to do???  In a panic I may have come up with lamest gift ever–but at least I was not running around all the shopping venues in my area, or trolling  the internet.  I was home having a bit of fun with one of the gifts I got years ago from “Flockette” Karyn!  I made a desk calendar of “Lambie” doing various weaving and handwork projects for 2016.

Here are a few images of Lambie doing projects.  In February she is working on some bobbin lace hearts.

Lambie at the loom working on a boundweave project

Lambie learns to dye from some expert mushroom dyed gnomes (dyed and knitted by mycologist Susan Hopkins)

And Bob made Lambie some reading glasses so she could do close work like embroidery.

Do you think I’ve gone a bit overboard??

And in other holiday fun that did not involve sheep–but did involve kitties which I also love– I made a several of these little knitted bags.  My oldest childhood friend Lea Ann (oldest as in in how long we’ve known each other, NOT how old we are!) gave me a kit for this precious little knitted bag.  You can get these kits at Creative Fibers in Windsor, CT.  The shop owner designed the pattern and calls it “Button Jar’s Chump Change.”  You can also just get the purse frame  from this shop and use your own yarns and fabrics to make these little gems.  The only other thing you might need is Nicky Epstein’s book Knitted Flowers.

This is the first bag I finished for a gift exchange in my bobbin lace group.

These are the other two.  The red bag is from the kit my friend gave me, and the purple one is for my sister.  It’s a great little bag for knitting tools (I put a collection of stitch markers in my sister’s bag) or it could be a little project bag for small things like tatting.

LeaAnn included a little kitty pin to embellish my bag.  The kitty is encrusted in ‘diamonds’ and is playing with a ball of yarn.  Initially I attempted to embellish my bag with knitted balls of yarn unraveling across the bag, but I wasn’t happy with that.  Now he is playing with his ball of yarn in a flowering vine.

Front.

Back.

I hope each of you has bit of time for doing something you love during this busy, busy season.  And although there is no snow yet in this part of the world, I hope your holidays are beautiful.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was enjoying a holiday lunch with two of my dear friends from New York/New Jersey, Bob got word from the State Department  (specifically someone in the OFAC office–Office of Foreign Assets Control) that we have been approved to visit Cuba this winter.

I am now officially excited and scared to death.  There is a 350 mile ocean crossing from Turks and Caicos to the first landfall just west of Guantanamo, Cuba.  I know that’s only 1/5th of what our sailing friends do when they sail to the BVI, but it’s more than this landlubber is ready to tackle….

Meanwhile, here is a little Christmas cheer from the Delamar in Southport, Connecticut. Whatever you’re celebrating this month, I hope it’s wonderful….

Postscript:  I may have spoken too soon.  Bob and I have been approved to visit Cuba, but our boat has not!  And we need permission to sail on our boat as much as we need permission for ourselves.  Stay tuned.

It’s that time of year again, and I don’t mean the holidays.  It’s the time of year when I have to shut down my house, walk away from my looms and leave behind my wonderful weaving friends,   I am about to get onboard our boat, as we do every winter, with only the most rudimentary equipment for weaving.  But since it is also the holidays, I will start with a few photos of what I love best about the holidays in New England!

Houses decorated for Christmas in Essex.

The Connecticut River waterfront on a chilly December morning.

A sycamore tree against the winter sky.

St. Anne’s Church in Old Lyme, where we went to hear Elisabeth Von Trapp sing a holiday concert with my good weaving friend Susan.

This winter we have a new sailboat that we bought last spring as we finished our 3rd winter sailing aboard our Saga 43′ Pandora.  Our new boat is bigger (an Aerodyne 47′), which means I can bring more stuff onboard!–and it is smoother sailing so that I should be more comfortable when we are underway.  I had to get all my ‘gear’ onboard in early October, and I put two copper pipe looms down below.  One is rather large and will be used to weave a stanza from a Robert Frost poem in a font chosen by our younger son.  The other loom has the still-unfinished small Portuguese Man of War.  I sure hope I finish it this winter.  I also have my bolster lace pillow in a cabinet that would normally store clothing.  There is so much storage on this boat that I hope I never fill it up with clothes.

We had planned to sail to the Caribbean so I had to get everything onboard in early October when Bob set off Hampton, Virginia, which is where one departs  in early November to sail non-stop for 1500 miles to reach the British Virgin Islands.  Bob would return before Thanksgiving so that we could have the holidays here and then we would fly to Tortolla in late December.  Well, that did not work out….. Since this is not a sailing blog I won’t go into the details, but it was a suprise to both of us and a difficult decision to give up our plans for the Caribbean.  Bob tells the whole story on his blog.

Now we will be getting onboard our new Pandora in Florida in late December.  Our revised plan is to sail to the Bahamas yet again, but to then head to Cuba if we can get permission from the State Department.  Bob has been working on this for the past several weeks, and we shoujld have an answer soon.  I am NOT looking forward to the long crossing — 350 miles — from either the far Bahamas or the Turks and Caicos to Cuba.  I’ve never done more than one overnight at a time.   Sailing westward from the far Bahamas will allow us to visit the southern coast of Cuba (about 600 miles long).  The prevailing winds and currents make it imperative to sail westward along that coast.  We will finish up in Havana in late spring with the short, 90-mile sail back to Florida.  So that’s the plan, but we don’t yet know if we’ll be allowed to do it.

If we do go there I’ll be looking for weavers!  I am always looking for weavers, bobbin lace makers, and any other textile makers.  While I have stumbled on a few sites that describe commercial cotton mills back in the early 20th c., I have found no evidence of current handweavers.  I have found several references to bobbin lace making, and I am quite encouraged by this.  In fact one story hits so close to home I am in shock!  A few decades ago a woman from the Westchester, New York, weaving guild traveled to Cuba and wrote about meeting a bobbin lace maker.  I was a member of the Westchester guild for several years in the 1990s, and I have friends who’ve been members of this guild for many years.  I’m certain that several of my friends must know the woman who wrote this article!  At the moment I cannot get back to the website where I read this.  It’s got to be there, and I hope I find it again soon.

Meanwhile, here are two other interesting stories about bobbin lace in Cuba.  In 2013, a group of photographers associated with Foothills College in northern California had an exhibition of photographs depicting modern Cuban culture.  There is a photograph of a Cuban woman, Adriana Martinez, doing bobbin lace taken by Joan Sperans. This what Sperans wrote about this woman making lace on a traditional bolster pillow: Adriana Martinez set up her Belgian lace exhibit on the Prado at the Sunday art fair. I stopped to admire her beautiful work and we started talking. She told me she was a professor of tatting and bobbin lace. Within an hour, several women who came to the art fair to learn how to make lace surrounded Adriana.

Adriana teaches lacemaking at a nearby school. These lace artists are in desperate need of thread for their art and trade. They often use string as a substitute. Despite the use of string, their work is still beautiful and of excellent quality. We talked and made tentative arrangements for a textile-based exchange when I go back to Cuba. I am hoping to encourage some textile artists to go on Ron Herman’s next trip. Before departing Havana, I received a surprise call from Adriana wishing me a safe journey. Adriana and the other women are so sweet.

I plan to bring a few spools of laceweight linen with me, and I will be thrilled beyond description if I can meet Ms. Martinez….or any of her students.  At least I know where to look, presuming there are still art fairs on the Prado. (And I know that “bolillo” is Spanish for bobbin lace.  Knowing the words “rendas de bilros” in Portuguese certainly helped me find the lace museum in Vila de Conde. ) I also found an article about a lace maker named Ana Blanco who left Cuba in 1962.  Since she was an adult at this point she may no longer be living.  She taught bobbin lace in the Jacksonville area of Florida for many years, and won the 1990 Florida Folk Heritage Award.

A quick look at Cuba.

In preparation for leaving, I am also putting a warp on my AVL mechanical dobby.  At the last meeting of the Connecticut weavers’ guild, the Just Our Yarn women gave a presentation on using their handpainted yarns in both warp and weft.  I was quite intrigued by the effect of using entirely different colorways together in both warp and weft and quickly worked up the yardage I’d need to make fabric for a lightweight jacket.

Their 10/2 tencel yarn, called Almaza, comes in 1000 yd hanks, and I bought three for my warp that will be 6 yards long, sett at 36 epi, and about 16″ in width on the loom.  I did not want to work from balls of yarn so I decided to wind each hank of Almaza onto a spool that could be used from my LeClerc spool holder.  Each spool just happens to hold the Almaza hank with very little room to spare.  How lucky is that?

I am holding one end from each of the three spools to wind the warp on my AVL warping wheel.  I hope to finish winding on the warp today.

I doubt I’ll get through threading the heddles before we leave, but at least I’ll have a warp waiting for me all ready to thread when I return in May.