travel – Page 16

Carnivale….it’s all about the textiles and the smiles

February 23, 2020 | 1 Comment

Carnivale started yesterday afternoon in Fort de France, and will continue through Ash Wednesday. The schedule of events is complex and interesting — everything from children dressed up as little devils on ‘Red Day’ to ‘Unilikely Couples’ on Wedding Day. I think Ash Wednesday is a Black and Red day, when a relic of King Vaval, the devil, will be paraded around and then symbolically buried for the start of Lent.

The parade on Saturday was like a pre-game event. It began with locals carrying colorful umbrellas and walking/dancing to loud drumming. It got us all in the mood!

Two years ago we were here in February, but it was not yet Carnivale. People were getting ready, though. The fabric store wares were spilling out into the street, and the fabrics were all garish, glittery yardages geared for making the most outlandish costumes.

I happened to wade/paw my way through the bolts to the back of one particular store, where I found beautiful printed linens from France. I hope to find a similar treasure this year….. I did not remember where the shop is located, but I have now managed to stumble on it twice, and lose it again. I hope I can find it one more time tomorrow morning when the shops will be open only for the morning. No pressure!

Some of the bystanders in yesterday’s opening parade were as interesting as the participants! Perhaps this little lady bug will be part of the childrens “red day.” I saw this gold sequined fabric in a number of shops.

Drumming factors heavily in these parades, and for several days prior we heard various groups practicing. It’s hard not to get in the mood when these wonderful rhythms are pulsing and vibrating through the city!

There were costumed dancers to accompany every drum corps (do you think that’s what they call themselves? Nah….), and plenty of spectators joined in the dancing too. Tutus came in all colors, sizes, and lengths.

There were queens of every conceivable type. I think this lovely woman must be queen of Fort de France for Carnivale.

The Coconut Queen….actually, I believe her banner reads Dauphine for next year’s Queen of Fort de France. Madras is the traditional fabric for all these islands.

There were lots of other queens too…. here is a tiny bride. Perhaps her ‘dauphine’ title suggest that she will be a bride in some future Carnivale….perhaps in 3 more years. I wonder if they pick these queens so long ahead of time so there is plenty of time to make these incredible dresses. I’m just conjecturing.

In the realm of beauty queens there were quite a few categories. I believe this beauty’s sash reads “queen of the north.” What beautiful young women, all. And the dress…it has hand drawn images, carefully placed

I’m not sure what this woman represented, but what a great costume!

Not all the women were young. Here’s a woman of a certain age, looking elegant as ever. I could not read all of her sash– perhaps queen mother of St. Lucia.

There were two children’s groups. One had children dressed in stereotypical Native American costumes–although this photo of the first row does not show that as well as the next several rows of chidlren– riding tiny ponies. They were adorable. Comically, they were followed by several older children carrying shovels and a one large garbage can in case of droppings.

The cutest children’s group was a drum corps. They seem to be elementary school aged children. Some played lengths of large bamboo while others played bongos and small drums. Their headdresses were the most fun! Can you see the bongos on their heads?

Even better than wearing a bongo on your head might be wearing a cage with a parrot inside! Do you think the kids quarreled over got to wear the caged birds? Do you think moms and grandmoms had fun making these? — though I certainly don’t want to assume that only women could make these fun accessories. Some men could have had a hand in these great headdresses!

Then there was a group I have dubbed The Grandmothers. Enjoy their ageless beauty, and most of all, their grace! I wish I could show you how they danced their way down the street.

And my favorite, the Queen Mother of Fort de France.

Tomorrow, Shrove Sunday, is the beginning of the true celebrations. It’s the day for all colors. And it’s King Vaval who will be buried on Ash Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday are called the ‘fat days,’ Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras. Who knew? Here is a rather clumsy Google translation of the day:

The Shrove Sunday is the first day of the carnival celebration. This day is open to all follies and everyone puts on the disguise of their choice. A richness and a creativity are mixed then in the various parades, thanks to the freedom left to each one, to show his imagination. This day is characterized precisely by the variety of colors. It is also the day when King Vaval, a giant puppet made for weeks, will be presented in total secrecy. He will take the lead in the procession and will be promoted until Ash Wednesday.

I’m looking forward to it!

Mend and Make Do

February 10, 2020 | 1 Comment

…a well used phrase from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. It served them well through two world wars and the depression. It’s gaining favor again, as our affluent culture has had so much consumerism and so many things sent to landfills. Some of us are trying to make do with less, and repurposing the things we have. The culture of recycling things, reinventing uses, and making do has never gone out of favor in the small islands where Bob and I are living this winter. The people here have had no choice about that!

Bob and I are in Dominica now, the ‘nature island.’ Indeed, the rainforests here are as unspoiled and pristine as you could possibly imagine. It’s been just over two years since this island was flattened during hurricane Maria, which rapidly escalated to a category five hurricane. Bob and I visited here about two months after Maria occurred. The entire island was brown, with not a leaf left in the rainforest. Along with many other cruisers, we delivered tarps for use on houses and buildings that had lost roofs. Here we are again, barely more than two years later, and the rainforest is healed, but many man made structures are still covered with tarps that have decayed and shredded over the past two years. Patrickson Wallace, who was our guide for a day tour of part of the rainforest told us that he was without electricity for 10 months. At least he now has power and a real roof. Meanwhile, nature heals herself faster and more thoroughly. I am currently reading Overstory by Richard Powers. Being here is a wonderful environment for reading this book. The link will take you to Barbara Kingsolver’s review in the New York Times.

Dominica is a small island (17 miles wide by 29 miles long) that rises straight out of the sea with volcanic mountains covered in rainforest. This island has 365 rivers, and many waterfalls. A small group of cruisers that we’ve met over the past few years spent a day together with our guide to visit a number of waterfalls. We were lucky to be almost alone at Emerald Pool where we swam at the base of a tall waterfall.

Then we visited Trafalgar Falls and had lunch on a deck overlooking another waterfall that made us feel as though we were high up in tree house! We ended the day at a hot spring fed from volcanoes.

I took a video of Trafalgar Falls, but I don’t have enough bandwidth to upload it. Hopefully I can get that done sometime soon from someplace onshore!

Another visit we took was to a small, family run chocolate factory. The estate grows both cocoa beans and coffee beans. The chocolate is made entirely by hand, and the daughter of the founder took us on a tour of the process. So… speaking of using what’s available…. the father and founder of this endeavor used wood from the property, that was mostly downed in hurricane Maria, to make a small living space above the chocolate sales area for his daughter. Wow! Sometimes making do turns into something spectacular. All the exterior wood–railings and shingles–and all the wood in the interior came from this property. The owner sold Bob two very nice boards of Galba, the local name for this hardwood. I will let Bob figure out if there is a more familiar name to us for what he got.

A romantic aerie with amazing views from the unglazed windows

Onboard our floating house, Bob and I have done a moderate amount of mending and making do. Our refrigeration is failing. We need a new compressor, or perhaps an entirely new system. Our system is not made anymore, and Pandora has a 24v system since she was built in Finland. Someone in California is cobbling something together for us. He’ll ship it to St. Lucia sometime in the next fews days/weeks. We’ll sail there, and either Bob will install it or he’ll find a local technician to do it. In the meantime, we mostly buy each day’s food, and we plan to live off pantry items if (when?) it fails.

On a more personal level, both Bob and I have had to repair some of our clothing! We can’t just pop down the road to the local Marshalls or a local shoe store to replace the clothing that has fallen apart. I bleached one of my white shirts which had become dingy from so much sunscreen on the arms. Can you believe it? Sunscreen turns cotton a very odd yellow. I must not have rinsed out the bleach well enough because the fabric at the neckline just disintegrated while the shirt dried on a line. And of course the decayed fabric did not occur on a seam, and of course I don’t happen to have any white thread on board. I had to make peace with using pale blue thread for the repair. It’s not quite as discreet a mending job as I’d like. So another adage came to mind: if you can’t hide it, decorate it!

I do have quite a few colors of embroidery thread onboard, so I had another run (with running stitch) at poppies. I do love poppies!

Bob has found that his best walking shoes (Tevas) have delaminated on the soles….both shoes, not just one! He happens to keep some rubber cement onboard, so he peeled apart the layers of the shoes and used a small paint brush to cover each delaminated layer with rubber cement. In this photo he has just finished clamping the shoes, hoping that the pressure will make the glue adhere better. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow when he tries them out walking up to a Fort Napoleon.

Both Teva sandals are clamped together for get the rubber cement to take.

The first time I visited Dominica I bought small baskets with lids for the members of my basket group. I was told that the baskets were made here, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. And I didn’t ask enough questions! On this visit, I am seeing many more baskets!–some of them are exquisite. I asked some questions! There is a native culture here called the Kalinagos who live in their own community. They are known for making baskets out of a type of reed plant that some early native settlers brought with them from South America. The first of these settlers may have arrived on Dominica as early as 500 bce, a full millennia before the French claimed Dominica as their own in 1635. Along with baskets, the Kalinago make items out of gourds and coconuts, as well as making dugout canoes and throwing pottery.

The basket materials come from a reed plant called larouma. The reeds are shaved into 1/4″ staves and 1/8″ weavers, and are often dyed with natural dyes in brown, black, blue, and yellow to create designs with the natural tan. I’m so glad that I learned a bit more about these basket and the people who make them. If our refrigerator holds out a bit longer and if the weather keeps us pinned here, we’d love to visit the Kalinago Territory here in Dominica. Mother Nature will make that call for us.

We’ll see what the next few days bring. Our weather router predicts that we’ll be here in high winds for some time longer. Meanwhile, Carnivale will start next week in Fort de France, Martinique, and we hope to be there! We cannot make any definite plans since the weather controls our destiny. We’ll have to see what comes and make do.

From Antigua to Orkney

January 12, 2020 | 1 Comment

The weather has been wild in this part of the world, not unlike many places these days. We are having multiple squalls a day (and night), with high winds and torrents of horizontal rain to go with it. At night we open and shut our hatches so many times, first to get a bit of a breeze in order to sleep, then to shut things down so our cabin doesn’t get drenched. We both lose track of how many times we get up in the night, and at this point we are both suffering from sleep deprivation. So, when I found this recent article from the BBC online, I could not help but notice the similarities, even a world away from here.

The article is about Ronaldsay sheep on Orkney Island just off the northern coast of Scotland. Another article called Orkney “a freckle off the north coast of Scotland.” How true. Ronaldsay are small, hardy sheep who’ve managed to live on a seaweed diet for quite some time now, ever since the sheep owners cut the sheep off from pasture.

Ronaldsay sheep on Orkney. photo from BBC

Cute sheep, isn’t she? About a decade ago I ordered a kilo of white Ronaldsay fleece from Elizabeth Lovick on Orkney. She has a venture called Northern Lace, and she teaches and designs knitting patterns in traditional Orkney lace work. It took a long time for my fleece to arrive. When she mailed it, she mentioned that I might never get it, if US customs should deem it unsafe. Well, it did arrive, and I enjoyed the process of washing and combing it before spinning it. When at last I had a medium weight, 3-ply yarn, I knitted it into a fisherman’s gansey for my younger son Chris. No, it’s not traditional. The yarn was, but I made up the sweater pattern myself, attempting to satisfy Chris’ needs and style. At the time he was an undergrad student in Rochester, NY. Later he took the sweater, along with several pairs of wool socks that I also knit for him, to Manhattan while he continued his studies there and then worked for a few years. At one point, he lived in an unheated hallway in Chinatown (yes, he paid rent for this dwelling; yes, it was illegal). That sweater came in handy for a few years. Now he lives in the Bay Area has no need for such a garment!

wow! Small photo, low res. He’s so young!

But back to the sheep. Close to 200 years ago, the sheep farmers built a stone wall around the entire perimeter of the island to keep the sheep on the beach so that other livestock could feed on the pasture. The sheep have become accustomed to, and have actually thrived on, their seaweed-only diet. Occasionally a sheep will get through a broken or weak part of the stone wall, and you know if one sheep gets out it’s not long before they are all out.

The sheep on the proper side of the wall. Photo from orkney.com

The article is about the new sheep dyke warden/shepherdess who’s been hired to maintain that wall and keep an eye on the sheep, as well as what scientists are learning about a seaweed diet. It turns out the seaweed-eating sheep do not emit methane when they belch. It turns out that methane gas is 30 times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide. Think of all the ruminant livestock throughout the world, adding so much methane to the environment. While it’s certainly not a cure-all for our problems, it could be one of many efforts to ease things. These diminutive sheep have led scientists to research the possible benefits of adding seaweed into more livestock diets. The North Ronaldsay Trust began looking for someone to fill the position of sheep dyke warden during the past summer, 2019. Sian Tarrant who is from East Sussex, and has a degree in marine biology from St. Andrews, seems to fit the bill. She wanted the job, and the island folk wanted her. She has already worked on a number of National Trust projects, recently studying seals on one of the uninhabited islands in the Orkneys as well as in the sub antarctic off the coast of South Georgia. Want to read more about this interesting woman? Here you go!

All this makes me want to comb and spin some Ronaldsay again. This time, I’d go for the darkest brown fleece. Maybe I would use it for tapestry. So many ideas, so little time! Meanwhile, the wind is howling here on this Sunday afternoon. We won’t get frostbite from it, or die of hypothermia, but it is still pretty extreme weather.

A New Year, A New Decade

January 2, 2020 | 4 Comments

The last couple months of 2019 brought some unexpectedly sad surprises. Archie Brennan left this world on Hallowe’en, followed closely by one of my tapestry students. I did not know her well, but she was instrumental in helping me realize how important it is to share our knowledge with others. She was new to tapestry, and after a lifetime of beautiful work in other areas of handwork, she was serious and committed to learning a new skill in weaving tapestry. I was so sorry that we didn’t have more time together. The final shock came when a close friend of mine died unexpectedly in early December. She had not shared her situation with anyone but her closest friend, another tapestry weaver and mutual friend. The mutual friend made sure that things were in place as well as they could be. I’m still reeling from this loss. Of course, it was cancer, one of the most likely causes of an early demise.

I am still thinking of these friends– Archie, Nancy, and Anna– every day, repeatedly going over my memories and shared experiences of each of them. It’s a treasure trove of learned insights, experiences, and shared fun. Sometime over the past few years I came across these quotes about grief–

“I’ve learned grief is just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

“Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.”

I’d like to think that during the next few months I’ll begin to enjoy my memories without so much pain attached; I’ll learn to swim the tides and currents. The important thing is to take these dear friends with me, to remember them, to keep working, knowing that in some way they are at my side.

And through all this the holidays were insane. We spent time on both coasts, which meant a lot of travel, and this occurred after deciding to spend 10 days with Bob in Antigua, in mid-November. It was a great distraction to be with family. My last few days at home before traveling to Maryland and then California, were spent in a frenzy of knitting and weaving presents I wanted to give. In most years, finishing projects is a stressful time, and of course it was stressful this time around as well. But, it was different in a significant way. It was therapeutic to be at my loom for hours on end. It was therapeutic to sit in my favorite chair, with my feet up on an ottoman, knitting for someone I love. I realize how essential handwork is to my well being. Duly noted for future.

So, my new year’s resolution is do more handwork. I made a good start yesterday by warping one of my copper pipe looms and even starting to weave. I worked on the idea for my image, and I felt so proud to get such productive work done on the first day of the year.

Here are some photos of those projects that calmed me during this time of loss. I didn’t finish everything I’d hope to do, but I made peace with that. I had bigger fish to fry for sure.

Here are two of a set of napkins that I wove for Chris and Melody. I barely had time to weave just the two and get them hemmed. I knew they’d understand, and of course they did. I was so touched by how much they like them.

Before I left I stayed up late retying the loom so I could get back to it when I return in April.

I had a long warp of deflected double weave on the loom for a good part of the year. Of course, when November rolled around I thought what great gifts cowls would be. There are six of them, in differing lengths. I gave five of them to friends and family. I loved seeing Melody wear hers, which is the one all the way to the right.

Lastly, there are the knitting projects: a sheep named Spud for our granddaughter Tori who just turned 3, and a tunic sweater for our 18 month old granddaughter Emme.

Emme is adorable in red, and I loved making this sweater pattern.

When we celebrated Christmas with our grandchildren and children I brought Rhett a sweater that I knitted for his father Rob, more than 30 years ago. You can imagine what this photo means to me.

So we are at the start of a new year and a new decade. Admitting to myself the importance of working with my hands every day, I hope this will be the start of some good things. Grief never leaves, but it can certainly be put to use for healing and celebrating the wonderful times and learning experiences that have come from those who meant so much to us. I know that sounds quite sentimental. It is what it is.

Loss in the Midst of Bounty

November 11, 2019 | 1 Comment

It’s a fact that we all march on with our lives, lurching or gliding, and then something stops us in our tracks. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” Oh boy. So true. (Actually, I just googled that phrase, and it seems that it is attributed to someone named Allen Saunders who wrote an article for Readers’ Digest in 1957, with that phrase in it. There you go….the marvels of the internet. Most of us know this phrase from a wonderful John Lennon song, “Beautiful Boy.” If you’re interested, see this.)

I did not mean to digress. Nothing can match that feeling of hurtling along through life and having all your plans stopped cold by an event, a moment after which nothing can ever be the same. During the morning of November 1, only 10 days ago, I learned that Archie Brennan had passed away during the afternoon of the previous day–Hallowe’en. At that moment all my whirling and spinning stopped. I know that thousands of others, across every continent, felt that same shock. Dear Archie…. he meant so much to everyone he encountered.

I imagine his many students and friends are in much the same position I’ve been in lately: struggling through current projects, delving into uncharted, creative ground, making progress and facing setbacks. The bounty of our work: I have too many projects going on at once, and I imagine you do too. Inspired chaos….well, hopefully inspired.

So what do we do with our grief? With our wonderful memories of classes and workshops with him? Meals shared–pizza and Chinese take out? With the memories of his humor, his gentle critiques of our tapestry work? Most of us who studied with him are not spring chickens ourselves at this point. What’s the best use of our own time left? There’s no one answer to any of these ponderings . But there are lots of possibilities for each of us to consider about our own creative output, whether in tapestry or some other art form, or in the way we interact with others. Everyone who encountered Archie certainly got a glimpse of how creatively Archie looked at the world. There was humor and a gentle social commentary in every piece that Archie chose to spend his time creating. He was endlessly fascinated with getting know the people who crossed his path, and he was generous, so generous with his knowledge. Those of us who weave are much indebted to what he taught us.

Someone once asked Archie what was the most difficult piece he had ever woven; he answered: the one on the loom right now. …and there it is, the very nature of everything we do. Each of our hurdles advances us some tiny bit forward for the next hurdle. Archie was part of our advancement, either in tapestry weaving or in looking at the world in a more creative and socially conscious way. The best we can do is take our hard-won knowledge and use it, over and over, and remember him often along our journey.

I am not a religious person, but it was poignant that Archie left this world during the hallowed evening, on the precipice of all saints. His patience and his humor always made me think he was a bit of a saint…. Farewell, dear teacher.