travel

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.

Each year the quest for 10 sheep presents is never far from my mind.  My sheep group has been meeting for 37 years now, and I have been a member for about half that time.  The group has renamed itself a number of times, but the most colorful name is the “Flockettes.”  As the years have passed we have now become rather good sleuths at finding sheep Christmas cards and sheep wrapping paper and ribbon.  I kid you not, this is major holiday sheep hunting and can make or break my mental stability!

So let’s start with the sheep tableau at the porch door to my house. They are a recent gift from my good friend Susan, who is not a member of the sheep group.  She just knew how much I would enjoy this little flock.

One of the most popular gifts for our sheep group is tree ornaments.  Most of us now have a ‘sheep’ themed Christmas tree somewhere in our houses.  Our mantles, front doors, and dining room centerpieces are usually based on sheep.  After 37 years of getting 10 presents each year we have a LOT of sheep!

This year, as Thanksgiving approached, I was getting fairly nervous that I still did not have my sheep presents OR any  appropriate sheep wrapping paper and ribbon.  What’s a sheep lover to do???  In a panic I may have come up with lamest gift ever–but at least I was not running around all the shopping venues in my area, or trolling  the internet.  I was home having a bit of fun with one of the gifts I got years ago from “Flockette” Karyn!  I made a desk calendar of “Lambie” doing various weaving and handwork projects for 2016.

Here are a few images of Lambie doing projects.  In February she is working on some bobbin lace hearts.

Lambie at the loom working on a boundweave project

Lambie learns to dye from some expert mushroom dyed gnomes (dyed and knitted by mycologist Susan Hopkins)

And Bob made Lambie some reading glasses so she could do close work like embroidery.

Do you think I’ve gone a bit overboard??

And in other holiday fun that did not involve sheep–but did involve kitties which I also love– I made a several of these little knitted bags.  My oldest childhood friend Lea Ann (oldest as in in how long we’ve known each other, NOT how old we are!) gave me a kit for this precious little knitted bag.  You can get these kits at Creative Fibers in Windsor, CT.  The shop owner designed the pattern and calls it “Button Jar’s Chump Change.”  You can also just get the purse frame  from this shop and use your own yarns and fabrics to make these little gems.  The only other thing you might need is Nicky Epstein’s book Knitted Flowers.

This is the first bag I finished for a gift exchange in my bobbin lace group.

These are the other two.  The red bag is from the kit my friend gave me, and the purple one is for my sister.  It’s a great little bag for knitting tools (I put a collection of stitch markers in my sister’s bag) or it could be a little project bag for small things like tatting.

LeaAnn included a little kitty pin to embellish my bag.  The kitty is encrusted in ‘diamonds’ and is playing with a ball of yarn.  Initially I attempted to embellish my bag with knitted balls of yarn unraveling across the bag, but I wasn’t happy with that.  Now he is playing with his ball of yarn in a flowering vine.

Front.

Back.

I hope each of you has bit of time for doing something you love during this busy, busy season.  And although there is no snow yet in this part of the world, I hope your holidays are beautiful.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was enjoying a holiday lunch with two of my dear friends from New York/New Jersey, Bob got word from the State Department  (specifically someone in the OFAC office–Office of Foreign Assets Control) that we have been approved to visit Cuba this winter.

I am now officially excited and scared to death.  There is a 350 mile ocean crossing from Turks and Caicos to the first landfall just west of Guantanamo, Cuba.  I know that’s only 1/5th of what our sailing friends do when they sail to the BVI, but it’s more than this landlubber is ready to tackle….

Meanwhile, here is a little Christmas cheer from the Delamar in Southport, Connecticut. Whatever you’re celebrating this month, I hope it’s wonderful….

 

Postscript:  I may have spoken too soon.  Bob and I have been approved to visit Cuba, but our boat has not!  And we need permission to sail on our boat as much as we need permission for ourselves.  Stay tuned.

It’s that time of year again, and I don’t mean the holidays.  It’s the time of year when I have to shut down my house, walk away from my looms and leave behind my wonderful weaving friends,   I am about to get onboard our boat, as we do every winter, with only the most rudimentary equipment for weaving.  But since it is also the holidays, I will start with a few photos of what I love best about the holidays in New England!

Houses decorated for Christmas in Essex.

The Connecticut River waterfront on a chilly December morning.

A sycamore tree against the winter sky.

St. Anne’s Church in Old Lyme, where we went to hear Elisabeth Von Trapp sing a holiday concert with my good weaving friend Susan.

This winter we have a new sailboat that we bought last spring as we finished our 3rd winter sailing aboard our Saga 43′ Pandora.  Our new boat is bigger (an Aerodyne 47′), which means I can bring more stuff onboard!–and it is smoother sailing so that I should be more comfortable when we are underway.  I had to get all my ‘gear’ onboard in early October, and I put two copper pipe looms down below.  One is rather large and will be used to weave a stanza from a Robert Frost poem in a font chosen by our younger son.  The other loom has the still-unfinished small Portuguese Man of War.  I sure hope I finish it this winter.  I also have my bolster lace pillow in a cabinet that would normally store clothing.  There is so much storage on this boat that I hope I never fill it up with clothes.

We had planned to sail to the Caribbean so I had to get everything onboard in early October when Bob set off Hampton, Virginia, which is where one departs  in early November to sail non-stop for 1500 miles to reach the British Virgin Islands.  Bob would return before Thanksgiving so that we could have the holidays here and then we would fly to Tortolla in late December.  Well, that did not work out….. Since this is not a sailing blog I won’t go into the details, but it was a suprise to both of us and a difficult decision to give up our plans for the Caribbean.  Bob tells the whole story on his blog.

Now we will be getting onboard our new Pandora in Florida in late December.  Our revised plan is to sail to the Bahamas yet again, but to then head to Cuba if we can get permission from the State Department.  Bob has been working on this for the past several weeks, and we shoujld have an answer soon.  I am NOT looking forward to the long crossing — 350 miles — from either the far Bahamas or the Turks and Caicos to Cuba.  I’ve never done more than one overnight at a time.   Sailing westward from the far Bahamas will allow us to visit the southern coast of Cuba (about 600 miles long).  The prevailing winds and currents make it imperative to sail westward along that coast.  We will finish up in Havana in late spring with the short, 90-mile sail back to Florida.  So that’s the plan, but we don’t yet know if we’ll be allowed to do it.

If we do go there I’ll be looking for weavers!  I am always looking for weavers, bobbin lace makers, and any other textile makers.  While I have stumbled on a few sites that describe commercial cotton mills back in the early 20th c., I have found no evidence of current handweavers.  I have found several references to bobbin lace making, and I am quite encouraged by this.  In fact one story hits so close to home I am in shock!  A few decades ago a woman from the Westchester, New York, weaving guild traveled to Cuba and wrote about meeting a bobbin lace maker.  I was a member of the Westchester guild for several years in the 1990s, and I have friends who’ve been members of this guild for many years.  I’m certain that several of my friends must know the woman who wrote this article!  At the moment I cannot get back to the website where I read this.  It’s got to be there, and I hope I find it again soon.

Meanwhile, here are two other interesting stories about bobbin lace in Cuba.  In 2013, a group of photographers associated with Foothills College in northern California had an exhibition of photographs depicting modern Cuban culture.  There is a photograph of a Cuban woman, Adriana Martinez, doing bobbin lace taken by Joan Sperans. This what Sperans wrote about this woman making lace on a traditional bolster pillow: Adriana Martinez set up her Belgian lace exhibit on the Prado at the Sunday art fair. I stopped to admire her beautiful work and we started talking. She told me she was a professor of tatting and bobbin lace. Within an hour, several women who came to the art fair to learn how to make lace surrounded Adriana.

Adriana teaches lacemaking at a nearby school. These lace artists are in desperate need of thread for their art and trade. They often use string as a substitute. Despite the use of string, their work is still beautiful and of excellent quality. We talked and made tentative arrangements for a textile-based exchange when I go back to Cuba. I am hoping to encourage some textile artists to go on Ron Herman’s next trip. Before departing Havana, I received a surprise call from Adriana wishing me a safe journey. Adriana and the other women are so sweet.

I plan to bring a few spools of laceweight linen with me, and I will be thrilled beyond description if I can meet Ms. Martinez….or any of her students.  At least I know where to look, presuming there are still art fairs on the Prado. (And I know that “bolillo” is Spanish for bobbin lace.  Knowing the words “rendas de bilros” in Portuguese certainly helped me find the lace museum in Vila de Conde. ) I also found an article about a lace maker named Ana Blanco who left Cuba in 1962.  Since she was an adult at this point she may no longer be living.  She taught bobbin lace in the Jacksonville area of Florida for many years, and won the 1990 Florida Folk Heritage Award.

A quick look at Cuba.

In preparation for leaving, I am also putting a warp on my AVL mechanical dobby.  At the last meeting of the Connecticut weavers’ guild, the Just Our Yarn women gave a presentation on using their handpainted yarns in both warp and weft.  I was quite intrigued by the effect of using entirely different colorways together in both warp and weft and quickly worked up the yardage I’d need to make fabric for a lightweight jacket.

Their 10/2 tencel yarn, called Almaza, comes in 1000 yd hanks, and I bought three for my warp that will be 6 yards long, sett at 36 epi, and about 16″ in width on the loom.  I did not want to work from balls of yarn so I decided to wind each hank of Almaza onto a spool that could be used from my LeClerc spool holder.  Each spool just happens to hold the Almaza hank with very little room to spare.  How lucky is that?

I am holding one end from each of the three spools to wind the warp on my AVL warping wheel.  I hope to finish winding on the warp today.

I doubt I’ll get through threading the heddles before we leave, but at least I’ll have a warp waiting for me all ready to thread when I return in May.