family – Page 3

A Very Strange Post

February 6, 2014 | 3 Comments

This might be the strangest entry I’ll ever post here. Perhaps too much information….but there you go. I made a brief post almost three years ago that my father died very unexpectedly. He chose to be cremated, and he asked that his remains be released at sea. When he talked to me about this, long before it was on anyone’s mind that it could possibly become a reality, he suggested Long Island Sound. He sailed there most of his short time as a sailor. But during that short time when sailing was so important to him I knew that he longed for bigger and warmer waters.

At one point he and my mother bought property on the West coast of Florida, hoping to settle there and keep their boat there. That never came to pass. And at the time he passed away, he had no idea that Bob and I also had big plans to sail farther than our standard stomping grounds, from the Chesapeake to Maine. My father was never interested in Maine. He was a southern boy all the way through, and he never got used to living in the northeast.

So, over the past 2 1/2 years that he has resided on a shelf in my house….(I know, please don’t judge me!)…I have had an underlying knowledge that he would love to be set free in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. His remains could travel the world in a way he’d always dreamed of doing in life.

My father and I always had issues, and I’m disappointed that we never could find a common ground while he lived. At least in this I think I can make him happy. My biggest regret is that my sister and my kids, who all loved him, cannot be with us to experience the moment. I have told them all my best guess as to when I’ll be doing this…. it’s hard to be exact, even in the 21st century, when the plans involve sailing! At the specified time this afternoon they will send positive energy out for their dad and granddad and say prayers. It’s long overdue, and he deserves this.

“Parable of Immortality”

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”
Gone where?
Gone from my sight . . . that is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
” There she goes! ”
there are other eyes watching her coming . . .
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout . . .
” Here she comes! “

— Henry Van Dyke

On the Road Again….

January 29, 2014 | Leave a Comment

We have slipped our land moorings and are on the road to our vagabond life on Pandora. I will miss my looms over the next few months, but I’ve brought some fun projects to keep me company….knitting (of course!), and this time some embroidery and a small tapestry loom. I’m intrigued with this image, and hope to play with it a bit. It will give me lots of practice with circles, won’t it? Circles are considered the hardest shape to weave…..I’ll deliberate on that while I weave a few dozen of them!

As you can imagine I’ve brought just about every color imaginable….small loom, big bin of yarn. I really wanted to design something with minimal colors, but my time was spent elsewhere over the past few months….and I’ve always been a sucker for color! It has been such a hectic fall and winter, and I have struggled to find a balance between weaving and designing while also enjoying the holidays and spending precious time with my husband’s parents during our last wonderful month’s with Bob’s dad. It was a tremendously moving time for both Bob and me. One week ago we moved Bob’s mother to her new assisted living facility, into a one bedroom apartment with magificent views of Long Island Sound. It was one of those days with gale force winter winds, and the views of the Sound were quite dramatic. She likes it! Her belongings look very pretty in her new place, and it already has a nice sense of home. On Saturday she told Bob that he has taken wonderful care of her since his father died, that she loves her new place, and that she felt he should take a well deserved, long vacation. So, although we hated to leave her so soon after such big changes in her life, we have hit the road for Florida where our boat Pandora has been waiting for us since November. Honestly, I was in no big hurry to return. I have grown quite complacent to be home in our quiet little town on the Connecticut River, even with the single digit temperatures and the snow. I got a fair amount of work done over the summer, and this most recent project is finished pretty much to my liking. Surprisingly, the first painted warp is the one I prefer. I could not have known this until I did the second one. I have made two braids that the piece will hang from, and I am happy with them as well.

Here is a detail of the braid….a fiddly process of making a tiny braid in the middle of the strands of silk, and then closing the braid into a loop and adding in more silk to continue with a bigger braid.

We have rushed down the East Coast in order to stay ahead of the ice and snow that has shut down Georgia and the Carolinas. We spent a wonderful night with Rob and Kandice in Baltimore before we hightailed it for Florida. We are in St. Augustine now, and although it is a nippy 40 degrees F with wind and drizzle, we don’t dare complain!

We are staying in this pretty little inn right in the historic district. Our balcony overlooks the Lightner Museum. We managed to sit out and enjoy the view for a few minutes before the chill drove us back inside. Here is a shot of our room with the railing outside of the large window and the little balcony for sitting just off to the right of it.

I am looking forward to dinner in the cozy, intimate dining room later today. Yesterday we enjoyed a glass of wine in the bar. A cocktail in the evening and a full breakfast in the mornings comes with the room.

Stocking up on a few luxuries for our time onboard, like blood orange infused olive oil and some good books from the used book shop!

Later we will visit the Lightner Museum and tomorrow we will do a little more touring before heading down to Ft. Pierce where Pandora awaits.

Journeys

January 11, 2014 | 2 Comments

The word journey has been foremost in my mind for months now…. my father in law’s major journey (his life) has just ended. He led a beautiful life, and he was as much a father to me as he was to his three biological children. He was a great man in all the best ways possible…. devoted to his wife, his children, and a consumate volunteer which means he was devoted to all the causes he he championed.

Lately my own journey seems fraut with anxiety, too many deadlines, too many places to be in such a short time. I feel like I’ve just returned from our long journey down the Eastern seaboard of the US and across to the Bahamas, and now we are to leave again in just a couple of weeks. Where has the time gone?

Well, mostly we’ve been spending some very special time with Bob’s father. It hurts to know you are losing someone, but in the long run I feel it has been a gift to help Bob, Sr. through the last months and a gift that we could be with him as much as possible for our own needs…. I think this is far better than losing someone you love without any warning at all.

During this last summer/fall/winter of my father in law’s journey I’ve been thinking about the Moirae, whose names are Clotho (the spinner), Lachesis (the measurer), and Atropos (the one who holds the scissors and cuts the thread of life).

I love Sarah Swett’s rendition of these fates “The River Wyrd.” She has done a great job portraying them having a laugh at our small lives, our loves, our passions. At this moment in the grieving process, I’m much too bogged down in the sadness of missing him, and wonderful memories, and nostalgia and schmaltz…. to treat this subject with humor. And I am searching for a way to find voice for the respect and love I have for my father in law’s life.

So I’ve been rather focused on images of the thread of life. My father in law, the original “Bob” in the Osborn family, had a wonderfully long life, although not nearly long enough for all of us who loved him. He was connected to many people, a life long best friend with his brother who died just weeks ahead of him, and a life long friend of a surprising number of others. How many people do any of us know who can get together regularly with friends they’ve known since before a marriage of 60 years?

Anyway…. my own recent journey has been in trying to depict images of a beautiful, long life. I’m not there yet, but impatience led me to attempt a less than fully developed idea, with a technique I learned a couple of decades ago from Betty Vera and revisited this summer with Sarah Saulson.

The technique involves dressing a loom with a warp, then pulling out the warp onto a flat surface, under tension, and painting the warp with dyes thickened with printers’ paste, or sodium alginate. Here are some photos of my first attempt at this.

My warp is silk crepe which I wound onto two spools for easier handling.

I made a stencil of my design on a manilla folder.

Here is the warp after painting. The dye is ProChem blue #402 mixed for full saturation with a little “New Black” added. You can see the stencil brush I used in the lower left. It is a wonderful tool that I found at Long Ridge Farm’s booth at Rhinebeck one year. It is made of very tightly packed natural bristles, but I don’t know anything else about it since the attached tag is in Japanese, and Nancy Zeller did not have the information on her when I bought it.

The dye required four hours to set with moisture at a temperature of 70 degrees F. After that the plastic film is removed to allow the warp to dry before being wound back on to the loom.

In my haste to work on this project (I had envisioned this piece hanging from the lectern during Bob, Sr’s. funeral…pipe dream!) I did not take any photographs of the weaving process. My 8 shaft Baby Wolf was threaded with an undulating twill, and I used a natural colored, smoothly spun silk thread for the weft. I think both warp and weft are in the range of 20/2 silk, but neither of these silks, in my stash for decades, were labeled. I threaded the undulating twill at 30 ends per inch. The seredipitous surprise after weaving and wet finishing was the amazing sheen of the silk crepe! It glows.

Here is the finished piece. It shifted more than I expected when I wound it back on to the loom, which is when I discovered that some of the heddles were not oriented properly on the shafts. A number of heddles were upside down, and I think this opposite orientation caused a bit more drag on the threads which resulted in significant shifting. I tried repositioning these threads by adding a bar at the back of the loom with these threads pulled around it….but as you can see from my photo, it did not help.

This is not what I had envisioned for the finished piece, but I am not unhappy with it! Yesterday I made a new warp (and used up all the rest of my silk crepe!) and dressed the loom so that I will probably be ready to paint again tomorrow.

In a Funk !!

November 19, 2013 | 3 Comments

It’s shocking to me to see that I haven’t posted since Hallowe’en, and that post doesn’t even count. It was just a funny photo….

I’ve been home now for more than two weeks, getting lots done, but not feeling terribly good about anything. Bob and I are in the throes of worries about our aging parents, and it’s an emotional and stressful time. Weaving and knitting…and spinning!….help me get through these times, but this time around things are pretty serious, and even my favorite activities cannot take away the sadness and the fear of what is coming.

Baking is another activity that soothes me during stress, so yesterday I spent some of the day baking toward our early Thanksgiving which we’ll celebrate this Thursday as well as next Thursday in order to see all of the family. I always make Julia Child’s croissants at some point during the holidays for those who will be sleeping over. I have to admit I stole one when they came out of the oven. Someone had to make sure they turned out well!

This morning is a glorious November day. There is always at least one late blooming rose after the first hard frost….a rose that blooms among the hips.

Most of the trees are bare now, but along our walk we saw one still bright yellow, and another that is still bright red!

Deep blue sky, red berries against the tan field, a spot of green from a rhody…and a lovely river make for a wonderful morning walk.

In a day or so I’ll update my current projects and write a little about the various events I’ve managed to attend since I returned home.

Chilly Nights, Warm Days

October 29, 2013 | Leave a Comment

The weather has moderated in the last few days so that we are no longer freezing to death! I know, I’m just a bit of an exaggerator! But it’s no fun being cold all day and then painfully cold at night. We made a very poor choice to take our sleeping bags off the boat and to skip bringing any serious winter clothes. It’s always colder when you are exposed outside all day while also on the water. Those sleeping bags are in my car in Annapolis, and they would have made all the difference in getting some sleep the past week or so….

This is yesterday’s pre-sunset. I think you can feel how soft and warm the day was. Just moments after taking this photo, Bob and I each got a text from my sister, wishing us a happy anniversary of our first date, 41 years ago. This is a landmark date we always celebrate, and if not for her text we would have missed it for the very first time. We are both wondering if this is our first big sign of getting older….

So we sat in the cockpit of Pandora, enjoying this view all the way through sunset. We blew the conch shell to herald the night, and headed out to dinner ashore in Belhaven, North Carolina.

Luckily we had already planned to go out to dinner. Boy, did we choose a fun spot! The Spoon River Artworks and Market….interesting name since I saw neither artworks or market, but only a restaurant! And a very nice one too. Here is a view from our table… it’s lovely, isn’t it? For the first time ever we chose to sit facing inward from a window table, instead of facing outward.

And walking around lovely Belhaven before dinner I spotted this pretty cottage garden that look out to the harbor.

Today we are headed to Oriental, North Carolina, then on to my final destination in Beaufort. I will get a few days there to relax before Bob’s crew delivers my car to me to head home while they get onboard to head offshore to Florida.