Category Archives: Fine Craft

I’m skipping to the end here to describe the keynote address given by Margo Selby on the final night of the NEWS Conference.  She is so young to have made such great strides in handweaving and in founding a commercial textile design business.  She is an enthusiastic speaker with a great deal of positive energy that emanates from her.

Her presentation was focused on the phrase she uses on her website (and is the title of the video that follows): “Beauty is the First Test.”  She does wonderful work with color and texture, and it was particularly compelling to me since I’d just spent the weekend in Sarah Saulson’s class creating cloth that would balance the colors of our painted warps with the various weave structures we had threaded on our looms.

Margo brought lots of items from her commercial textile line: scarves and wraps, small zippered bags, and lovely jackets and tops, all made from her lively fabrics which have silk warps woven with synthetic wefts that create a stretchy, bouncy fabric.  I was completely enthralled with her use of color and stretch and texture and asked where I could find her line in the US, to which she replied that the very things on display were for sale!  It was hard to choose, but when I am in the presence of such beautiful textiles I cannot walk away empty handed….

Margo ended her talk with a video that included her and several other textile artists (and one woodworker). This video includes a bobbin lace maker!!… and how often do you see any attention given to lace makers? The take away message in this video is this: “There is no place in the world for ugly mathematics.”  Clearly, Margo’s motto that ‘beauty is the first test’ demonstrates what we all know, that the mathematic proportions of size, color relationships, use of texture and smoothness,  is the basis of beauty in everything made by hand.

My first NEWS Conference has come and gone.  It was a whirlwind!  There were some great moments and some not so great moments!

My class with Sarah Saulson was titled “Freedom of Expression: Painting Your Warp,” and this is a technique I dabbled with more than a decade ago in a workshop with Betty Vera.  I wondered what might be different about Sarah’s process.  Much was the same, of course, but the smallest alteration can make a huge difference in the final outcome, as well as in one’s ability and confidence to attempt a technique at home, without the safety of a teacher and a roomful of helpful students!  Betty’s class so was wonderful and memorable to me that I was thrilled to try this technique again, and Sarah’s instruction helped me gain the confidence I need to attempt this on my own.  It was a combination of doing the process for the second time and tweaking at the some of the small, but very important details of the technique!  I’m thrilled to try this again as soon as I weave off the warp from this project!

The Process:

Make a warp and dress the loom according to what your finished project will be.  In our case we have put on enough warp at 8″ wide to weave two scarves.  Our guidelines were scarf weight materials, such as 10/2 or 8/2 cotton or tencel, or anything of a similar weight that would produce a drape-y fabric suitable for a scarf.  I have plenty of unlabeled medium-fine silks in my stash so I chose one of those which I documented in my earlier post.  I set it at 30 epi since it seemed slightly finer than 10/2 cotton.

For my first painted scarf warp I chose this image as my inspiration….sunlight on water.  I planned to change the color way to be something representative of light on water in the Bahamas….more aquamarine and periwinkle blue than this image.

The process involves weaving in a stick as tightly as you can once your loom is dressed.

Next, we cut off the bit of weaving with stick from the front beam and used that stick to pull off one scarf’s worth of warp, which happened to be the same length as our painting tables which were covered with plastic drop cloth.  Here is Sarah demonstrating that you want your beater leaning against the breast beam, with your brake released,  as you use the woven-in stick to pull the warp off the front of the loom.   Notice the table has been covered with plastic.

Once you have pulled your warp to the end of the table, you clamp the stick to the table and re-set the brake on your loom.  Then you crank down the tension on your loom so that the warp is stretched tautly from the back beam to the clamp at the other end of the table.  Ready for painting!

Mixing the dyes is no small feat!  This time around I found the process far less intimidating.  It’s still hard for me to get the colors that I have in my head, but of course that is going to take lots and lots of practice.  There is just no substitute for experience.  We were lucky to have Sarah’s guidance on mixing colors.  If you could name the color, she could help you get quite close to it.

So here is the beginning of my sunlight on water. As you can see from the photo, we mixed our dyes in little plastic cups and are using small foam brushes to paint. We are using Procion MX dyes which do not require heat, only a moist environment and time, to set.  MX dyes require mixing in water that has been enhanced with urea as a humectant.  We heavily spritzed our warps before starting to paint.

Into the final dye color combination in our little cups we added two very important ingredients!

1.  Dye activator, which only lasts about 4 hours, so we did not add that until we were absolutely ready to paint. Activator can be either soda ash or ProChem’s special powdered activator which is what we used.  I mixed up three colors I thought would get me started on this image, and I did not add activator until I had gotten all three colors to the hue and saturation that I wanted.

2.  The other ingredient is printer’s paste which thickens the dye solution enough to keep it from puddling and spreading as you paint shapes on your warp.

We were all a bit worried that the clock was ticking faster than we could paint when we added the activator, but Sarah was right when she assured us that painting would be the fastest part of this process.  We all got two scarves painted within the four hours of dye activation time.

The second color going on my warp

Fellow student (and Connecticut Guild member) busy painting her first scarf!

Connie Gray’s floral warp

Sarah demonstrated how to roll up the first painted scarf and prepare for the second.  You cover your painted warp with a layer of plastic film, then using the stick, roll up the painted warp as tightly as possible.  The plastic separates the layers of warp from each other, and by rolling as straight as possible, the edges of the warp should not fall in on themselves.

When you have rolled all the way back to the front of your loom, take some time to thoroughly clean the plastic draped table to get rid of all dye from your first painting session.  Then you release the brake on your loom, rest the beater against the breast beam, and begin pulling out the next scarf’s length of blank warp to paint.  When you have pulled out new warp to the extent of your painting table, clamp the sticks with the rolled up painted warp to the table, similarly to the first time. Time to start painting the second scarf!

When you have painted your last scarf, there is no need to roll it up.  Just cover with plastic and begin timing your 4-hour, dye-setting time.  The only exception to this is if you have used turquoise #410 which requires 12 hours to set.  Sarah did not bring that color since this class did not allow for such a long setting time.

Sarah and a few helpers came back to class about 9pm that evening to unwrap our warps from the plastic.  This is necessary because we planned to wind our warps back on first thing on the second day of class.  At this point there was no tension on the warps, and this was the moment I had dreaded!

But what an explosion of color greeted us for the second day of this workshop!  Sarah had found as many easels as she could and had draped our warps on them! The warps came off the looms,  and up in the air onto the easels!

The morning began with rewinding our painted warps onto our looms.  This was the moment I dreaded.  I just did not believe that these warps, now lightly coated in dye, and now without tension, would wind on smoothly.  But they did.

Best tip ever: From Allan Fannin,  begin winding with absolutely no tension on your warp.  Wind only 2 revolutions of your crank, then stop and go to the front of the loom to grab your warp.  Make a smooth hard tug on the loose warp that extends at the front of your loom to tighten down the warp you have just wound on.  Go back and wind on two more revolutions and then go tighten the warp again from the front of the loom.  Repeat this process until the entire warp is back on the loom.  It was a dream to beam this way!

Second Best Tip Ever, which works like a charm on a Baby Wolf (you’ll have to try it yourself on other types of portable floor looms):  when you are ready to tie up your treadles, tip the front of your loom forward and rest it on a chair or weaving bench.  Go the back of the loom and see if the treadles are now at easy an easy to reach height for you to stand or sit in a chair to work with them.  Do you tie ups from this comfortable position!  This gem of advice was given to me by Emily who learned it from someone else.

The second day of the class was experimenting with weft color and weave structure.   There were amazing changes in our painted warps due to the weft colors we chose and whether we wove with some simple or complex structure.  My loom was threaded with an 8-shaft advancing twill.  I had the option of weaving it in a straight twill treadling, or point twill, or a very long repeat of advancing twill.  I also had the option to weave plain weave.  So I experiemented with all those possibilities as well as weft color.  I tried yellow, hoping to bring out the sunlight areas of my painted warp, but as I expected, a yellow weft was too garish.  I then chose four different watery colors ranging from medium aqua to emerald green, to a deep periwinkle…..all colors I remember vividly from my Bahamian winter.  In the long run the medium aqua won.  It was in the mid range of the colors used in my warp, and it worked well with all the warp colors without dominating or drowning out any of the other colors.  It also worked well with the structure.  The color I liked almost as much was a purple weft.  The drawback to purple was that suddenly the advancing twill structure was more obvious than the painted warp.  It’s a delicate balance between the two and the aqua did it best!

Some people found that plain weave worked best on their warps, so in spite of having threaded more complicated patterns and having tied up their treadles for some interesting weaving, they really had to make peace with plain weave.  It was a dramatic choice for some of the warps.  Most of us felt that if the warps that were painted with fairly realistic images, in our case mostly floral type painting, plain weave was the best choice.

Here are some examples.  The choice of weft here does a great job at subduing the strong colors of the dye.  The twill structure on this warp just did not work, but plain weave is stunning!

While this is also a large floral looking image, it is not quite as realistic and her choice of twill looks wonderful on this warp!

This has been such a productive week while home alone.  I’ve made progress on my current tapestry, which has been neglected for the past 9 months.  I finished plying the saffron mohair and am contemplating ideas for a striped fabric with some kind of warp-direction float pattern in the brighter stripes, like a rose path or other twill.  Nothing has yet to strike my fancy.

Yesterday was the last statewide Connecticut weavers’ guild meeting, and I was thrilled to get there!  It was my first meeting since last May when we moved up here…  during the morning, I got a call from Bob (in Marsh Harbor, in the Abacos) to say goodbye and use up the last of his Batelco minutes on our Bahamas cell phone.  He and his crew were planning to leave mid-morning to sail the few miles to “the Whale,”  the eastern inlet just north of Marsh Harbor.  He’ll be using the transponder on board to mark his progress up the eastern side of Abacos as he heads north toward the Gulf Stream.  With luck, they will sail in the Gulf Stream, well off shore, all the way to Montauk at the top of Long Island.  That is 1,000 miles!  Thank heaven I don’t have to do that trip!  If all goes well he will arrive home in about 7 days, in time to celebrate Memorial Day!  (He missed that last year doing the same trip.)

If the weather does not smile on them, there are any number of places they can bail out, either south of Cape Hatteras or north of it.  Doing that will mean that he won’t be home as quickly.  He’ll be communicating with his weather router via sideband radio, and he’ll be sending me emails over the side band.  As of late last night Pandora was here.

Here are some Bob’s last photos of the Bahamas.  It’s already hard to believe that I was ever on beaches like this, with powder soft sand and aquamarine water!

We spent so much time looking for orchids and hardly found any.  What a difference a few weeks makes!  After a month in the wet season, Bob told me the Abacos are blooming with lots of these epyphytes (which I think are epidendrum) with pendulous flower stalks hanging down from trees.

I hope his trip home will be completely uneventful!

We are awaiting the coming storm at the stunning resort at Highbourne Cay.  We had a lovely afternoon and evening here yesterday, and today promises to be equally nice in spite of the rising winds.

I am having my morning coffee now while looking out at the palm trees that are bending dramatically in the rising wind.  This is the first truly cloudy day I have seen in the three months I’ve been down here.  In that same three months we have had only one brief, 10-minute rain squall.  Later today should bring some squalls, but many times there is no precipitation, so I’m curious to see what will happen later.  We’d love a little rain to wash away some of the salt on our decks!  Right now we have ‘deck shoes’ and ‘going ashore’ shoes, and we try very hard not to wear them into the cockpit and certainly not down below!  Keeping Pandora ship shape and salt free is always the top priority!

I feel very lucky to be here right now, and when we arrived we were the only sailboat here in a snug harbor full of mega yachts.  Later in the day another sailboat arrived, so now there are two of us.  And that will be it since the docks are full.  We definitely feel like the country cousins here!

Everything on this island is meticulously groomed by the resort, so although the island is covered in native plantings, it has definite look of being beautifully maintained.  People arrive here by either helicopter or seaplane.  In fact, as we entered the harbor yesterday a seaplane was landing right beside us!  That’s the first time we’ve given way to a plane rather than another boat!  There is a little launch that goes out to meet the plane and pick up the passengers!  Wow…

The beaches are also groomed here.  Someone rakes the beach every day (must be in the middle of the night though because you’ll never see them) and there are umbrellas and Adirondack chairs every few yards, spaced just far enough apart to give everyone their privacy.

In early evening we took our cocktails, a gin and tonic for me and a Dark and Stormy for Bob, to the beach and sat in the Adirondack chairs watching a gaggle of adolescents ride their ‘skim boards’ in the surf.

We had dinner in the restaurant, Xuma, that overlooks the Bahamas Banks.  There was a film crew making a promotional video for the resort,  taking footage of the sunset from the best table on the balcony.  They set up their Go-Pro on the railing of the balcony, and then the table was ours!  It was a stunning sunset with the coming storm clouds massing in the sky.  And dinner was delicious!   Bob and I shared some conch fritters, a roasted beet and goat cheese salad, and a Bahamian risotto dinner of prawns, scallops and a spiny lobster tail.  I did get another lobster dinner!

Today is cool and very humid with coming storm.  We will walk to the ocean beach today.  It is 2 miles long and gets raked each day.  I will probably take my latest knitting project and we’ll bring a picnic lunch.  I have finished the body of my ‘Mary Tudor’ and will probably put it aside until I get home.  It is time to cut open the front and the armholes, and I haven’t got any sharp scissors on board.  Better to wait until I have the proper tools.

Knowing that whatever I work on now will probably end up on the plane with me when I fly home (in 34 days!!), I looked through my stash with an eye for something portable.  About five years ago I started a traditional circular shawl from the Orkney Islands in an online workshop led by Elizabeth Lovick (http://www.northernlace.co.uk/).  I put it down for what I thought would be a brief hiatus, and then I lost it!  I did look for it several times over the years, but I didn’t find it until we moved to Connecticut and I began unpacking my stash.  I was happy to find it and put into the bins I brought onboard last fall.  It’s time has come!  Although I am not using the traditional Shetland lace yarn for this shawl, I am using something that seems very appropriate to me!  Quite a long time ago my English friend Lesley took me to Uppinham Yarns in ….  and among the many things that tempted me was a stunning cone of fine wool and cashmere in a wonderful shade of heathered claret red.  I’m happy to be reunited with this project!

Dinner tonight won’t be Xuma, but it should still be memorable.  We bought some Strawberry Grouper filets yesterday from a fisherman cleaning his catch on the docks.  There are fresh veggies at the resort market, so we will also have a salad! …the first in about 2 weeks!  What a luxury!

We hear that the weather has been quite challenging along the East Coast of the US, but here in the Bahamas spring is hardly different than winter!  We have had some challenging winds down here this winter, and since that has not yet stopped perhaps that is our ‘lion.’

During the most recent week of strong winds, we have been in a little archipelago of islands that include Compass Cay, Pipe Cay, Little Pipe Cay, Thomas Cay, and Joe Cay. These little islands are either uninhabited or privately owned by very wealthy individuals, so there is no going ashore and no provisions. Everyday we visit at least one new beach, each with its own marvels. There are more beaches than I can count, as well as a beautiful mangrove swamp that we explored at low tide.  Pandora may have a more pronounced starboard list due to my shell collecting!

Now aren’t you just dying to see these starfish in more detail??  The local name for them is ‘cushion star,’ and they come in differing patterns of gold and deep red.  The patterns and colors strongly remind me of stitched shibori on fabric first dyed a light Brazilwood , then stitched and dipped into a deep madder bath.  They are truly stunning!

While we’ve been here I have spent my mornings knitting or weaving  baskets, then after lunch Bob and I go exploring.  We relax in the evenings and often share dinners with our friends aboard Ariel.

My basket collection is growing…. I have given away the bigger basket in this group, and I plan to continue making a number of the smaller ones.  They are just the right size for a votive candle, and the candlelight makes interesting patterns as it shines through the coiled stitches.

I am just a few rows away from the shoulder shaping on “Mary Tudor.”  Then it will be time to cut the whole thing open and try it on!…. before starting the sleeves and front bands.

It’s almost Easter, and that feels very strange.  During this time away I have missed both my sons’ birthdays as well as Easter.  It’s the first time to miss these occasions with family, and I have to say it is decidedly a drag…  Well, I guess there has to be a little rain on our parade…

Almost daily someone asks me why I’m sailing around without a loom.  It’s surprising how many people know about the little looms you might consider for traveling.  Inkle looms, tablets, little pot holder looms, and of course(!) rigid heddle looms.  What surprises me more than their knowledge of little looms, is their conviction that anyone could be perfectly satisfied with such equipment.  I simply cannot figure out how to describe why I haven’t got a rigid heddle loom onboard.  They all seem to think I just haven’t considered my options well enough.

I mean, really… I do have two drop spindles with me, and I enjoy using them!  But I would not have a rigid heddle loom with me.  I simply cannot explain that to myself yet, much less to anyone else.

Meanwhile, I have taken up my “Mary Tudor” sweater again, and it is a very satisfying and fulfilling project.  Alice Starmore really nails it every time with her designs.  They make so much sense, knitterly, that they practically knit themselves. If I understood why I’d be a prolific designer myself!  In spite of her reputation for complicated patterns, I find that I barely have to look at the charts…. well, I do look at the beginning of each row (I wouldn’t want to lead you astray on that!)…but really, her charted designs are so artistic while also being so logical, that myopic chart reading is really not required.  I’m above the armholes now, about halfway to the shoulder shaping.  I am loving every minute of it!

On one of our recent walks on Long Island, Bob very nicely collected some Silver Queen palm spears for me.  Spears are what I am calling the new shoot of palm frond that rises out of the center of the plant.  I visited with basket maker Nancy on Trumpeter, and she very generously guided me as I started 8 baskets.  When I explained to her that beginnings and endings are the crucial bits of learning any new technique, she was all about helping me learn the beginning at least!  She had a basket ready for ending so she showed me one ending.  I have now completed my first basket by myself, and it’s nothing to write home about.  In fact, I’m not even sure it’s worth keeping!  But for the moment, it is my vessel for holding all the chaff I cut off the fronds before weaving.  Maybe I’ll throw it overboard when I throw out all the chaff…

A few shots from our palm frond foraging!

There are wild and domestic goats everywhere!

And even on these desert islands, we find a few things in bloom.

My most recent cache of shells and sea glass drying in the cockpit.  Even when I’m looking for palm fronds, shells are always part of the foraging.

We up anchored today and headed north for Cat Island.  I did weave for a while before sea sickness overtook me.  Ugh.  My second basket shows a litte more promise.  I spent most of the trip sleeping after taking a half dose of Stugeron.  It was a long day of over 60 miles. At an average of 6 miles per hour sailing, it took us 10 hours to get here!  A bit slower than travel by car!  After the beautiful aquamarine waters of the harbors, ocean sailing in the Atlantic with depths of 6,000 feet gave us deep indigo water with white foam on the wave crests.

Cat Island looks quite intriguing.  Father Jerome’s Hermitage is at the top of the highest hill here, called Mount Alvernia.  That hill of about 260 feet elevation is the highest spot in all the Bahamas!  On the summit he built a monastery called the Hermitage.  From the harbor it looks like it’s sitting atop a huge mountain.  I understand you can walk up to it in about 15 minutes, so that means something is very wrong with the perspective.  I think it’s a fairly well kept secret that it’s all smaller than it appears from the harbor.  I think no one wants to give away this little secret so the surprise isn’t spoiled.  But if you can walk up to it in 15 minutes, it can’t possibly be as imposing as it appears from here!

Father Jerome was an Englishman, born in the 2nd half of the 19th century, who was an architect, and an Anglican, before becoming a Catholic monk.  He enjoyed designing churches on many islands here in the Bahamas in the early 20th century.  In fact, the photos of the beautiful church in Clarencetown on Long Island was one of Father Jerome’s accomplishments. He built some churches along with the hermitage and his retirement home on Cat Island.  I hope to have detailed photos tomorrow when we visit.

We are anchored right near the Batelco (Bahamas Telephone Company) cell tower on Cat Island and are making good use of some unsecured internet with our wifi booster.   Life is good!

Pandora’s journey is still here!

Life has slowed down considerably today, now that the 5Fs festival is finished.  You’d never even know how much hubbub was here the last two days.  Bob and I went ashore for a walk around the island today, and all has gone back to the slow, sleepy pace of a small settlement on a remote cay.

One of the things I expected during our travels was access to local tropical fruits.  I expected to be eating mangoes and avocados everyday, as I had read about in the book An Embarrassment of Mangoes (which is about the Caribbean, not the Bahamas).  It turns out that the Bahamas chain is rather desert-like and there is no organized agriculture.  We have seen a few small gardens around people’s houses, but it is a hard existence for food crops.  We’ve seen a lone corn plant growing out of a crack in the limestone rock back at Black Point.

Here on Farmer’s Cay we have seen the first actual lawns around people’s houses, and small ornamental gardens that look well tended.  We have not seen any vegetable plots.  At all the island markets we’ve seen vegetables and fruit that have had a long journey to their destination and are much the worse for wear…  badly bruised fruits, tomatoes that look like they will never turn red, and most things looking rather dehydrated from travel.  The crates have stamps with US locations on them.  So I have not yet even had a mango or an avocado…

We have also seen quite a bit of cotton plants on this island, which is maybe the origin of its name Farmer’s Cay.  Maybe this is on of those locations where colonists tried to start cotton farming.  I was tempted to take a few bolls, but I restrained myself.  I’ve already got some lovely cotton, already handpainted, that I can spin…

We saw a bit of song bird life today….the same little yellow breasted bird we saw in Warderick Wells, that we now know is called a ‘yellow quit.’ And we saw a humming bird!  Imagine that!

Off the rocky shore near the center of town we watched a man removing conchs from their shells and then skinning them on a rock.  He had his sharpening stone with him on the rock and continually sharpened his knife in order to continue cleaning the conchs, which involves cutting off the thick skin and removing the claw.  He worked quickly, like a pro, which undoubtedly he is.

Just a bit further out in this same small harbor we saw three sea turtles surfacing repeatedly, and a giant ray.  Such common sights for the folks who live here, and such an exotic treat for Bob and me!

We saw the little island school at the highest point on the island.  It is a ‘school for all ages.’  I like that!

So far we have only seen Baptist churches on these islands, and I wonder if we will ever see any other denominations.  People here take Sunday very seriously, and all businesses (except restaurants) are closed.  Therefore I did not get to meet the owner of Brenda’s Kitchen.

This evening is the Super Bowl back home, and here in the Bahamas they know about it!  The yacht club where we are moored is hoping to lure all the visiting Americans ashore for happy hour starting at 4pm and dinner during the game.  I only saw a small old fashioned tv (meaning not flat screen) that looked about 10″ square in the billiards room off the bar.  Surely, they don’t plan to use that??

I also heard Lorraine all the way from Black Point on the VHF  this morning announcing her Super Bowl party with non stop happy hour throughout the game and a pig roast buffet.  Now that’s one sharp business woman!  I know our friends on Sea Schell and Kalunamoo will all be attending!