Fine Craft

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.