Category Archives: Fine Craft

It has been a particularly harsh winter along the eastern coast of the US, so no surprise that a 1,000 miles south in the Bahamas the weather has also been a bit challenging. There have been very strong winds clocking around the entire compass rose, so that each week we end up needing to find a safe anchorage that has good protection from all directions. There are only a handful of safe places that fit this bill, and if you don’t get there early there won’t be room for even one more boat! Everyone is looking for a hiding place these days.

But I don’t expect that anyone enduring an East Coast winter in the US will have much sympathy for us. Still, it’s been quite challenging to stay safe, and that has caused me a fair amount of stress! As our weather router warned us this morning, March is going to go out like a lion, not a lamb!

And yet, there are still idyllic spots in between the weather fronts. We did some shelling while hiding from the weather in Pipe Creek, near Compass Cay. Our most exciting find is the tulip snail (right side, center)!  They are a predator of little conchs.

At Compass Cay you can swim with the nurse sharks that they encourage by feeding them each time the fisherman are cleaning fish or beheading lobsters.  If bull sharks or lemon sharks come near the dock, someone chases them off. The first day we were there there were almost as many young children in the water as there were sharks.  I wish I had a photo of that!  Well, in six weeks, I should have a photo of our 30 yr. old son Rob playing in the water with them!

Big Major’s Spot is very popular, so you can never be the only boat at anchor here, but it’s not a safe place in these endlessly clocking winds, so we weren’t there for long this year. The pigs come running at the sound of a dinghy motor. There are baby pigs this year, and they are growing fast. They doubled their size in the two weeks between our visits!

I was so busy taking photos of Bob with the babies, looking through the lens, I didn’t see the 800 lb. mama come right up to the boat and stick her head into the boat, almost bumping me with her big snout!  Perhaps she thought the camera might be tasty!  I almost shrieked!

We hid for several days in the Exuma Land and Sea Park at Warderick Wells, where we spotted these ramoras who came to check out the vegetable scraps we had thrown overboard.

Also at Warderick Wells, we spotted a flock of egrets on one of the small cays, and we startled them into flight with our approach!  Back at home we tend to see individual egrets, not entire flocks.

On top of challenging weather, we have also had plenty of little problems with electronics and gear. In one hard blow at Staniel Cay our anchor got stuck under a limestone ledge, and then was damaged getting it out. It is now impressively ruined! Luckily we have an equally large spare on board. This boat has more spare parts than food and clothing. You can always wear dirty clothes, or eat canned soup for days, but replacing engine parts, or electronic parts, or needing an anchor is not something you can do without even for day!

One of the challenging equipment failures during this trip is the loss of my iPad, close to three weeks ago. Not only does it have a couple of highly important navigational aids that we rely on, but it also is the hotspot for our computers, and my library of books and knitting patterns and cooking recipes (this is a HUGE loss!). While my iPad is still under warranty, I have no way to send it back to the US for replacement. Since there is no place to buy a new one down here, we have ordered one online through our older son back in the US. The iPad is being delivered to Watermaker’s airline in Florida, and they fly people and equipment to many of the little airstrips on various cays in the Exuma chain. Our deliver will happen later this week at Staniel Cay, a good choice for us since we can easily walk to the airstrip from the harbor. We didn’t want to add a taxi ride (often a golf cart taxi) to the expense of shipping by charter plane!

As I write this, we have the new iPad!  I have my recipes back (whew!), my knitting patterns, and Bob is currently re-loading the Garmin Blue Charts!  Hopefully this is the end of such big challenges.  We came down here to relax!

Our winter in the Bahamas is well under way, and even our first guest, our younger son, Chris, has come and gone already.  Bob and I were thrilled to see him right on the heels of his trip to Thailand.  He showed us wonderful photos and videos and told us so many great tales.  He met people from all over the world, mostly young people who are taking off even more time than he is.

We used our week together to show Chris some of our favorite cays in the Exumas, which naturally included Allen Cay with the wild iguanas, the Land and Sea Park at Warderick Wells, and Big Major’s Spot where the wild pigs swim out to you to beg as you dinghy in to shore.  This year there are baby pigs, and they are adorable!  The big pink Mama pig swam out to us and three little piglets waded into the water and cried for her to return!

 The lovely beach at Hawk’s Bill Cay

Pandora at anchor in Warderick Wells….

We visited one new spot with Chris called Hawk’s Bill Cay.  It is a less visited place with beautiful white beaches.  We ended the week at Staniel Cay where Chris could get a flight back to Nassau. Chris and Bob snorkeled into Thunderball Grotto together, and then we had a farewell dinner at Staniel Cay Yacht Club. It was a lovely time, all in all.

We walked to the little airstrip on Staniel last year, but this was the first time we actually saw the flight procedure!  The gate is an outdoor gazebo, and there is a woman who shows up about a half hour before take off to check people in for the flight on her clip board.  That is the extent of security.  The plane lands and she puts the passengers on board according to weight (using her judgment!  No one had to ‘fess up!), while the pilot stores everyone’s baggage in the nose of the plane.  Then all the onlookers are shooed off the rough limestone airstrip and the plane departs.  We miss Chris terribly now.  Hope we can get enough bandwidth at some point to skype with both Rob and Chris.

We’ve had quite a bit of excitement on this trip.  We’ve seen big sharks at every cay we’ve visited.  Last year we didn’t see sharks until we got south of Georgetown. Chris got some great footage of a big nurse shark right at Pandora’s stern.  While nurse sharks are harmless, we have also seen some large lemon sharks this year.  It makes us take stock pretty carefully before going for a swim!

Somehow a little gecko got on board with us for several days.  He was living in the main head (nauticalese for bathroom).  I’m certain we each took showers for days without knowing he was there, but once we did come face to face, he was traumatized by us, and I was terrified of him!  Bob and Chris were tempted to let him stay.  Bob seemed to think he could live off fruit flies!  Luckily for me, he is now ashore in the Land and Sea Park, and I hope he is happier there!

Yesterday a US Coast Guard rescue helicopter showed up right in our little anchorage off of Staniel Cay.  It did some fancy maneuvers for almost an hour around dusk.  It was amazing to watch! We imagined the pilot to be about 24 years old, and he could hover that big beast in a tight spot right off our port. He lowered the helicopter until it was right over the water, throwing up a wide circle of spray.  I’d love to know what they were doing and why they came to Staniel Cay.

There have been other excitements as well.  A Canadian couple we met last year got into some trouble in Cuban waters last week.  They ran aground on a reef off the northern coast of Cuba and were stuck pounding on this reef for over 24 hours before Cuban authorities came to help them.  Luckily they were in contact with other boats and the US Coast Guard (who could not help them at that location).  All ended well, but it must have been such a traumatic experience.  This morning we heard that the Bahamian Coast Guard (BASRA) has discovered there are foreign boats that have not properly checked in to the Bahamas, so they are now conducting ‘board and search’ missions on random boats in harbors.  We have all the proper documentation, but I sure hope we don’t get boarded!

It’s been a good couple of weeks for getting some other things under way as well.  I will write about that shortly.  I am paricularly happy to have had a couple of calm days to get my tapestry loom warped and even start weaving!  I’m having a lot of fun with those circles!  I thought I could do some weaving today, but we have strong westerly winds that are kicking up quite a rukus in this harbor.  I think we will head out shortly for a short sail to Cambridge Cay and a calmer anchorage.  Farewell Staniel!

This is the sun that set on my father’s remains on his first evening traveling the Gulf Stream.

May all the dolphins, turtles, and sailfish, and all the creatures of the warm Gulf Stream sing you home….

Well, my journey with warp painting continues with round two.  Here is the list of what went wrong this time.

1.  Warp was too wet.  I got more bleeding in the knot area than I would have liked.  Ugh…. (Note to self:  in future blot the warp before painting!)

2.  Mysterious faint smudges of pale blue that are no where near where I was painting.  These blue smudges are behind the stencil and it was a brand new stencil that I cut since I was afraid any leftover dye on the first stencil might cause problems (unlikely, I now know, since the dye on that has lost its activation)….still, I was also afraid that the manilla folder’s cut edges might have gotten a little soggy from the first round of dyeing so I just thought it best to go with a new stencil.  So, how on earth did these smudges get on the warp?  There is no dye at all on the back of the stencil, and the smudges occured in an area that was covered by the plain, uncut part of the stencil.  No clue….

See all those smudges above the beginning of the knot?  Most of them will be in the hem, but not all.  I am pretty bummed about this right now…. the blue warp that is in the lower left corner of the photo is my shadow…..not a blue warp!

I’ve been thinking about the kind of shifting I’m getting as I wind back on, and although the shifting has been quite different for each project, there is one thing that the two projects I did at home have in common that is different from the two projects done in class with Sarah Saulson.

Sarah insisted that we tug on our warps after every revolution of the warp beam.  I hated doing that.  I felt like I was losing the registration of what I’d painted when I grabbed the whole width of the warp in one hand and tugged.  But I have to admit that the two scarves done with that technique have almost no shifting.  I guess I will give that a try this time.  Besides, I feel like this round is already a failure, so not much to lose.

It’s no surprise that living on board a boat has its challenges….some things are just so easy at home and so hard on the water.  I have gone for months and years at home with no major equipment failures…..heat, water, appliances.  At home we expect these things to go on working for decades….  On board they break all the time.  You cannot get through a single sailing season without constant repair to major things….. why is that???

So, I won’t go through the laundry list of things that have gone kaput on Pandora.  It’s too long and technical for a weaving blog anyway.  But I will say that these problems fall heavily on Bob, so he has been under strain to find the source of our engine problems and our failed heating system.  We have been freezing the past few days as the temperatures have been unseasonably cold in Virginia and North Carolina.

I finished my niece’s sweater and have plenty of yarn leftover to make her a matching hat….I could almost make a second sweater! (Polly Macc’s Brother/Sister pattern)

But I have been SO cold that I decided to take out a bigger unfinished project so I could wrap myself in it as I knit.  It’s the fun Vivian Hoxbro wrap called “Zig Zag.”

As I began to take a close look at where I left off and how to get back into the zen of this pattern I began to realize that’s it’s been a really long time since I put this away.  I bought this kit when I met Vivian at a workshop at a friend’s house….we were able to arrange this workshop because the friend offered to meet Vivian at the airport on her very first knitting workshop tour of the US, which meant that we became her very first group of students on her US tour.  Ours was not a scheduled workshop, but something that my savvy friend was able to put together since she was housing Vivian on the first leg of her US tour.

So….how many years ago was that??  Vivian’s book Domino Knitting was new in the US, and she had copies with her to sell.  It was autumn, and I knitted my Zig Zag through that season and on into winter.  I remember specific knitting times when I was waiting in a physical therapy office, happily knitting, while my younger son was getting therapy for some long distance running injuries.  Yesterday I asked Christopher what year that might have been, and he thinks it was either his sophomore or junior year of high school.  That was a long time ago…..2002 or 2003.  And since I met Vivian a few months earlier in the fall of the previous year, I’m pretty certain that I started this pattern in fall of 2002.  Eleven years ago…..

What surprises me about how long it’s been since I set this project aside is that I have thought of this fun pattern every few months, planning to get back to it.  For over a decade I have told myself that I would pick up my Zig Zag right after I finish this or that other project…..and it’s now been 11 autumns.  Where does the time go??

It seems I’m not always on top of posting finished objects.  That is because I am focused on the process, the decisions, right or wrong, the ideas, the mistakes, the journey.  When a piece is finally finished I stop thinking about it with the same maniacal focus, so it slips into obscurity…. well, not totally, but certainly the journey seems done to me at that point.

Here is the finished trail of pears.  It was a terrific learning process.  The image is so simple that my focus became the line and the color of each pear.

I am waiting for some deep brown, medium weight linen to arrive so I can mount this little tapestry, which is ….  And I am hoping that the bit of wrinkling in the center of the piece will dissolve once the tension is off the loom.  Normally I wouldn’t have an ounce of hope about this, but Archie seemed to think that is what will happen.  Please let him be right!

And here are the two scarves from my workshop at NEWS with Sarah Saulson.  I still have not gotten to a bead store to purchase something to embellish the plain hems.  And I have not yet painted the last bit of warp. So in reality, these scarves are not yet finished!

Now back to what really intrigues me…. I have come back to the tapestry of my older son, and that journey is still exciting!  I am shading his neck and cheek right now and hope to reach his ear by early next week.  There is a LOT  I am not happy with on this piece.  I feel driven to finish it so I can perhaps do it again….better.

Ooops!  You can see the finished pears behind him…. oh well…

These didn’t get posted as quickly as I intended….I made the mistake of tackling some boxes in a room off my studio, and now I am buried in stuff that I have no idea where to put!

I have opened Pandora’s box, and now my carefully organized studio is a sea of knitting, spinning and weaving materials that is far vaster than I can handle!  There just isn’t enough storage room for all this stuff!  What to do?

Meanwhile, my two scarves are finished and cut from the loom.  I decided to hem them rather than have fringe, and now I’d like to do a little beaded embellishment at the hem….for this I need to find a local bead store, and I need time to do the beading. Here they are after a hand wash, hanging to dry from a birch tree in my front yard.  I wonder what the neighbors think when I dry handspun skeins and dyed projects.

It feels like it will take months for me to unbury myself from the chaos I’ve unleashed by opening all those boxes!

In fairness, it’s not all fiber related.  The chaos includes a lifetime of printed music from my performing days, a set of dishes that I could not squeeze into the kitchen or dining room when we moved in last year, several lifetimes of photos that include our kids plus both sets of parents’ photos (they have both moved into assisted living facilities and now there stuff resides with us!), my father’s ridiculous collection of DVDs and our collection of music CDs which are no longer necessary.  I’d like to give Bob the task of dealing with the DVDs and CDs, but his plate is already laden with other chores.  I think it’s all up to me, and there will be no weaving or knitting until I get to the bottom of all this stuff!

And, naturally, all I want to do is weave!  I’ve come home from NEWS so inspired!  My dyes have arrived and I’ve made plans for the last of the warp I made for trying this technique!

During the conference I bought the book Custom Woven Interiors by Kelly Marshall.

I want to weave almost every item in the book, but I’d like to start with this rug!….as a runner in the kitchen and a smaller version for the two Dutch doors in my family room.

And meanwhile…. there is all that inspiration I got from the exhibits at NEWS.  Oh yeah, that was the point of this post….  here are the photos.

From the Instructors’ Exhibit, this is Dianne Totten’s wonderful collapse weave jacket.  It is done in the manner of ‘shibori on the loom’ with extra warp and/or weft threads that get pulled to create the pleats.  Then the fabric is treated with something that keeps the pleats in even after washing.  I hope to take a workshop in this technique someday!

This is the back of Barbara Herbster’s large wrap.  I have done a lot of scarves and shawls in this technique of supplemental warp with ribbons.  I wouldn’t mind getting back to it!

I thought this was a great combination of items together!  A  matching set of double woven blanket and pillows with the wonderful ply-split woven vessel.

There were wonderful household linens in the static juried show!  These were the items that inspired me most!  Look at the dragonfly inlay in this tablecloth!  It is a picnic set with wine bottle holder, silverware wrap, and matching napkins!

I love the overshot inlay on the corners of the napkins to match the table cloth!

The colors in this rep weave table runner and placemats are terrific….better than this photo shows.  They were woven by Barbara June Gordon.

A loom woven shibori hand bag!

This transparency of a lady slipper is a gem.  There was a larger transparency that won an award, but this small work is the one that won me over!  Look at that great woven border!

And THEN there was the fashion show!

I am intrigued with this beautifully woven and assembled handbag!

Great use of color and stripes in this vest.  It looks like it would be flattering on almost anyone.

This is an amazing piece, woven with horsehair and feathers and attached to a leather strip which fastens around the neck.

This jacket was woven from some lovely materials that I have now forgotten!  Hemp perhaps?  and linen?  It is called “Birch Bark Jacket” and the materials and woven technique make it a perfect match to its name!

It was woven with an undulating reed!

And this is the piece de resistance, designed and woven by Barbara June Gordon! The woven structure creates all the fitting in this top, and trust me, it fit the weaver perfectly!  She was brilliant to model it herself so we could all marvel at her skills.  It is an amazing feat of color, structure and fitting perfection!

Now you can see why I wish I’d never opened that first box.  I’d rather be weaving!

Yesterday I began weaving the second painted area on my workshop warp.  I did not finish this scarf although I was able to finish the first scarf in one day.  After experimenting with various weft colors and weave structures, I found that either plain weave or a straight 1 through 8 treadling sequence looked the best on my brightly colored warp.  I knew I probably couldn’t stand to weave two yards of plain weave.  Now I realize that I could just barely stand to weave two yards of straight treadling!

The first scarf was woven in an advancing twill treadling that had a 72 treadle progression.  This kept me on my toes!  I found I was soon yawning through the simple    1 – 8 repeat of the second scarf….  I ended up watching streaming episodes of “Call the Midwife” to keep myself awake!….and still, I didn’t finish.  Hopefully today!

By the time I was painting the second scarf on this warp during the workshop, time was getting very short!  I opted for my simplest photo of a vase of various lilies that I had cut from my son’s garden.

Here is a little tour of some of the NEWS exhibits.  First, the guild exhibits:

The Rhode Island Guild did an entire exhibit related to books.  The pieces on display were either inspired by literature or had to do with book making.

Sorry the focus is a bit off in this photo.  Still, I had to include it because it gave me such inspiration for making bags! Part of the Connecticut Guild’s display was a handbag making project that one of the area groups had completed

The Boston Guild has published a book of weaving patterns to celebrate their 75th anniversary.  Their exhibit showcased the projects from the book against a backdrop of pages from the book.  This may be my favorite project from the collection!  Certainly it will be the one I tackle first from this terrific book!

This is a stunning towel woven by my friend Emily from the New Hampshire guild.  Perfect color and structure choices!

I think there was a year’s worth of inspiration in the guild exhibits alone!