Fine Craft

Isn’t that an odd saying?  If you do bobbin lace perhaps you’ve heard it before.  Although I have heard it before, I did not heed it.  I did not even remember it!

I had finally gotten to the point in my current lace project where I believed I had made all the mistakes possible to make.  Ha!  I had gone backwards and forwards, and backwards again so many times, and had solved problems in all the segments of this pattern:  from being short a pair of bobbins in my half trails which then gave me problems in my braided edge,  to then ending up with too many pairs of bobbins for my sewing edge.  It was an embarrassingly long process which could have been shortened if only I’d had access to some experienced lace maker…..but impatience and stubborness always drove me on!

Finally, just when I thought that forward was the only direction for me now, one of my threads broke right at the edge of the weaving so there was no tail to use to tie the bobbin back on.  Ugh!  The break definitely happened because of all the weaving and unweaving I’ve been doing.  Twisting and untwisting caused this fine linen thread too much stress.

Along came my wonderful lace mentor and dear friend Micheline, who heard of my dilemma and called to ask me if I remembered the phrase “milking the faerie cows.”  Well, yes I did…..but I had no memory of what it meant. Micheline credits Christine Springett with this bit of sage advice, which is:  when you are making a braid you must tension it as if you are milking faerie cows; i.e, very, very gently.

Bingo!  (On top of everything else!) That is exactly what I was doing wrong.  I was really giving my edge bobbins a good strong pull to get my braid threads to tension evenly.  And on top of all that forward and backward weaving….well, that fine linen just could not take any more.  It doesn’t solve the dilemma I’m in now, but it sure will help me not to do it again.

So….alas….yet another bit of unweaving.  Micheline says I need at least 1/2″ of unwoven thread to make the mend in this thread.  I believe the mend is called a ‘lace knot.’  It’s the knot you make to connect two bobbins of thread together.  It involves making a slip knot in one thread, then putting the other thread through the loop of the slip knot (in this case my tiny 1/2″ bit of somewhat shredded linen) and closing the slip knot while pulling on the thread in the loop so that the slip knot transfers onto the thread in the loop and so that slip knot no longer slips.  It’s the very thing you do not want to happen when you are tatting.

 Since I’m dealing with such a short bit of linen where the break occurred, I plan to enlist Bob’s help (I can hear him returning home just now!) to hold the little bitter end of broken thread with a tweezer while I attach the longer thread from the bobbin with this technique.  Wish me luck!

….no luck on having the third hand for help.  I released Bob from bondage and managed to do the knot by myself on the first try.  Even at this magnification, I cannot see the mend….I hope you can’t either! Forward again!

 

It is spring in the Connecticut River Valley, and the lush greeness of everything is such a startling contrast to the desert islands of the Exuma chain in the Bahamas.  I love all this green!….not to mention daffodils, tulips, hellebore, and bleeding hearts.  In just the five days I’ve been home the trees have leafed out so much that the canopy of leaves must be at least three times greener.  I love it!

Like last year, I made it home in time for the Essex Village May Market, an event that the local garden club hosts.  If you arrive early enough, and I did (!), you can buy some of the garden club members’ choice plants from their personal gardens.  I got a bleeding heart, some English bluebells, a forget me not, a pink fall anemone, and a helianthus.  The plants from the members’ own gardens are HUGE, and cost far less than smaller plants at the local nuseries.  It’s the biggest attraction of the event, and I did well to arrive as early as I did! I was not too far from the front of the line.

 

It was also Mother’s Day weekend, and our younger son came out to visit from New York.  He also invited a group of his undergraduate friends and a couple of their significant others to visit.  It was a very festive Mother’s Day, even if only one of these young people was actually related to me!  They made a lovely dinner for all of us, and they did all the shopping, the prep, and cleaning up!  Wish I’d thought to take a photo of them!

I am about to go down to my studio and begin a rather involved stash search for a project I need to get started on soon.  My local area guild is doing an exchange where each of us makes fabric for a drawstring lunchbag and napkin that will coordinate with a coffee mug that belongs to another guild member.  We all got a photo of someone else’s mug and began designing a fabric to go with it.  Here’s the mug I got, a lovely handmade ceramic design by the owner’s daugher!

Hopefully in the next day or so I will have my yarn picked for the fabric.  While I was away this winter I used my Fiberworks program to design a huck structure to mimic the flowers on this mug:   

Hmmm…unless you are familiar with looking at huck weave drafts you probably cannot see the flower motif.  Huck ‘blossoms’ when it is cut from the loom because the warp and weft floats can relax into curves.  Wet finishing gives show this fabric off even further!

Here is a photo of linen napkins I wove in basically the same structure, although the huck pattern is just along the edge in my napkins and the linen is far finer than the current fabric will be. The fabric I’m designing now will have the huck ‘flower’ all across the width and in stripes of varying colors with a small black stripe between the color changes and woven with a black weft.

Also, I have had some quiet moments to sort through my bobbin lace project.  It involved more going backward than I expected!  Backward….forward …. further backward….a number of times.  In the end I went all the back to the corner, but luckily no further!  And now I am happily going forward.  It is very calming and therapeutic to do bobbin lace, especially going forward!

Bob is almost home….so close, and yet so far!  He is only about 50 miles away, which is only about a 7 or 8 hour sail from here.  BUT, the winds have turned against him so that even motoring would be difficult.  The winds are a bit strong and right on the nose.  I hope he will have his big homecoming tomorrow evening.

 

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!