family – Page 5

A Sailor’s Thanksgiving

November 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Like American ex-pats the world over, sailors also get together to celebrate our Thanksgiving tradition.

St. Marys, Georgia, is well known for bringing sailors together for a Thanksgiving festival. The local Riverview Hotel opens its dining room to hundreds of cruisers, and locals volunteer to roast enough turkeys and hams to feed this army of transients.

Hotel owners Jerry and Gayla Brandon started our morning off with a bang by mixing up a large cooler of Bloody Marys while Charlie Jacobs delivered them by dinghy to every boat in the harbor! I’ve never had a drink at 8.30 am, but I do highly recommend it!

The sailors arrive at the hotel from late morning through noon bearing all the side dishes and desserts. Three long tables are set up in the hotel lobby to hold all the platters of food.

It almost felt like family, and it was a wonderful gathering. Everyone was a bit homesick for loved ones, but we were a rag tag family to each other… and that was okay!

Missing my family and friends quite a bit this weekend….but I’m also thankful for the generosity of St. Marys’ community and the newly made connections to very friendly cruisers.

I did wear my sleeve-less “Ann Jacket.” And at the end of the day I picked up stitches and started the first sleeve.

Family Time

October 8, 2012 | Leave a Comment

We have just spent the weekend with our two sons Rob and Chris and Rob’s girlfriend Kandice! Kandice was a sweetheart to host all of us along with Rob’s dog Bosun at her house in the suburbs of Baltimore! We all crammed into one car, with our laundry and weekend gear! We laughed a lot, played with our granddog and Kandice’s three cats, drank margaritas and ate wonderful food!

I don’t know what we were thinking to drive back to Annapolis (in boat show traffic!) on Saturday to walk around the town and have a late lunch aboard Pandora. Just getting five people in the dinghy at such a crowded floating dock was a bit over the top! We spent the afternoon walking through the Naval Academy. There was a wedding in the ‘chapel’ and it was lovely to see all the men in uniform and the bridesmaids in rich fall colors of deep purple dresses (aubergine) carrying bouquets of deep orange and red gerbera daisies. Those young women had to be freezing in their strapless dresses during the outdoor photo session!

We ate a lot of decadent food together, but Kandice’s Sunday morning ‘Monkey Bread’ took the prize!

This is our last day in Annapolis….not a bit too soon for me! That’s an odd thing to say about a place I love….so many beautiful places all within easy walking distance! But to spend a week in a city while living on a boat is definitely weird. Living on board is much more suited to being off the beaten path, in some remote location that is utterly unspoiled. To be right in the middle of a busy harbor, especially during the biggest sailboat show in the US, is really quite jarring! I’m living off the grid while sitting just off a bustling city that rarely sleeps! The Naval Academy run their stadium lights all night long! (Well, that’s not entirely true…I think they are off from about 2 – 5 am each day. Still….)

This is the kitchen window in an Arts and Crafts brick house circa early 1900s right near the academy. I was smitten! Wish I could have seen the whole kitchen! I do want that light fixture!

Another view of the chapel at the Naval Academy.

Here is Bob taking a photo of Pandora from the Academy.

Chris took a couple of photos of the family during our weekend together, but I do not have them yet!

We will work our time slot in the SSCA booth this afternoon, after finishing up on our last needed purchases from the show, and tomorrow we will be on our way to more secluded locations.

The weather has changed and it’s now definitely autumn on the Chesapeake! It was raining and in the mid-50s (F) when we returned to Pandora yesterday afternoon. It went down into the 40s last night. We are running our Esbar heater now… it’s definitely time to head for warmer climes if we are going to live this way! Here is this morning’s sunrise.

Days 25 – 28, October 5 – 8: Annapolis and Baltimore suburbs (by land!)

Tackling My Toika

August 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

In spite of that pep talk from my son, in spite of Su Butler’s excellent website with extensive information, including photos (!) about tying up a Toika, and in spite of perusing every forum post about Toikas I could find on Weavolution, I could not get my loom to work. When I opened a shed I had such a jumble of threads at differing heights, there was no way to throw a shuttle! And I won’t even mention how hard it was to depress the treadles.

This is a warp I made somewhat over a year ago, before I knew for certain that we’d be moving. As soon as we decided to put our house on the market, the real estate agent we used insisted that I take this loom apart and put it in storage. She thought my studio would show well as a second family room. We rented a storage unit and I put both the Toika and my 40″ AVL in it, not to mention lots of other studio equipment.

The project I have on the Toika is 8 shaft boundweave threaded in rosepath at 10 epi. I’ve used some precious tapestry warp that is hard to get these days, and I put on about 6 yards, 24″ wide to make several boundweave wall hangings. I’m envisioning a little story board of my family. For me I have charted out a floor loom, a castle style spinning wheel, a drop spindle, various garden flowers, and maybe a bucket for dye! For my husband I’ve charted a boat, and anchor, and a car. My head is brimming with ideas to include our two sons, along with various cats and dogs…. and yet…. I could not get the loom to work.

Today I came close to tears. It wasn’t pretty…. I became obsessed with talking directly Su Butler because I believed that she was the only person left in the world who could sort this out for me. Either she had some advice or it was time to get rid of this loom. Shame faced, I sent her an email. Within moments she wrote back and recommended we talk on the phone. Hallelujah!

My Toika works like a dream now! What a relief….

So, what did I do wrong? Well, first (and probably most importantly) the distance between the bottom of the shafts, the top lamms, bottom lamms and treadles should be about the same. Not knowing exactly what that meant I had them within 2″ of the same distance apart. Su said I needed to get all these within a 1/2″ of the same distance. Bingo! The other dilemma was my treadle height. Doing it as described on her website didn’t give me the necessary position when the locking pins were removed. My treadles ended up slanting upwards toward the bench, and that was no fun for trying to depress them! She was familiar with this little quirk on some looms and explained to me what to do. Now everything is in great working order!

So, these are not the best looking trees by any stretch….but the loom is working well, and I don’t mind working on my little graphed charts to improve the image. I’ll give it another go shortly.

8 am next morning…. I have better trees!

I was compensating for my graph paper squares too much in my first attempt and therefore elongating the trees too much. Now I think I’ve got it! So I will weave a header and begin the first actual wall hanging! Can you imagine me doing a happy dance around the loom??….punching the air! Yippee!

Better looking trees shortly….

A Knitter’s Memory Lane…

December 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Sometimes early in the new year I perform an “Airing of the Stash” where I get all my yarns and spinning fibers out and have a look. I will be doing that as soon as I step away from the computer today.

Earlier today I did something that I rarely do: an airing of the stash of knitted garments. I opened my cedar-lined, cherry chest which my husband made 35 years ago as a wedding present to me. This chest holds three decades of my adult life in the form of knitted garments. It holds every sweater I’ve ever made with exception of the ones I no longer own. All the baby, toddler, and youth sweaters that my sons wore, all my own sweaters that I do not currently wear, and all the sweaters I’ve made for my husband in past years before I realized that he was never going to wear a sweater of any kind. There are a few precious sweaters that were knitted by my husband’s mother and one of his two delightful and eccentric great aunts. One of her sweaters is a cream wool Tyrolean-style cardigan with vertical columns of beautifully embroidered flowers between the columns of cables, bobbins, and eyelets. You probably know the style. No one does this much anymore because of the labor involved. It is a gem.

Sweater Stash 1 crop Dec 29, 1 30 11 PM — Aunt Ruthie's Tyrolean Sweater

Then there are about a half dozen sweaters that I obviously knit in the 80s… they are painful to look at! During that same decade I was knitting the baby and toddler sweaters that are so classic and timeless, but somehow, for me I was knitting sweaters with styles that could never stand the test of time. I have removed these sweaters from the chest and am contemplating either throwing them out or donating them somewhere. It’s hard to imagine donating them….they are truly awful, their single attribute being that they are at least made from natural fibers.

In the chest is my very first knitted garment which must be from the mid-70s, a textured vest pattern from Tahki that was made from their Donegal Tweed yarn in brown with rust colored flecks. I have a clear memory of knitting this vest during numerous evenings, sitting on a metal bar stool in my future-husband’s woodworking shop in order to spend time with him while he worked on a project. Also in the pile is my first attempt at lace knitting….not a shawl or scarf, but a lovely lace Chanel-type jacket that was a Phildar pattern for which I used Phildar’s mohair blend yarn. Sweet, sweet memories!
The children’s sweaters bring back a flood of memories. In particular there was one spring when my small community held a fashion show, and I decided to participate by modeling my first Marion Foale’s design, “Badminton,” while both boys joined me on the runway wearing matching cabled vests and coordinating knickers that I sewed for them. (I wore a store bought skirt with a print of ships’ signal flags on a sky blue background.) We were all in shades of daffodil yellow and pale sky blue. This memory is hilarious to me….my sons modeling in vests and knickers….how cruel!
I am sorry to say that the Marion Foale sweater, while classic, has not made the cut for staying in the chest!

This trip down memory lane is prompted by our hard decision to leave our current house and move out of the NY metro area. We hope to go back to a slower pace and quieter lifestyle that we used to enjoy when we lived in New England. I know that times have changed everywhere, but we hope to downsize both our possessions and our frenetic pace. Hence, the airing of not only the stash, but everything we own!

Life is what happens…

June 10, 2011 | 4 Comments

…when you’re busy making other plans….

In the midst of my weaving, spinning, basket making, bobbin lace, knitting and gardening my life has taken a sharp turn.

I was so busy getting two Nantucket baskets ready for weaving while sailing in Maine in July and August… enthusiastically looking forward to a week of weaving at Vavstuga later this month… admiring this year’s crop of weld blooming magnificently and watching for indigo seeds to sprout in the garden. I’ve finished a blanket for a good friend recovering from hip replacement surgery and have recently started Deborah Newton’s ‘greenhouse tank’ from the current issue of IWKnits.

Then Life struck. My father died unexpectedly on May 19, and now two other family members have passed as well. I had to move my mother from her home to mine, a great distance away, and then into assisted living. I am buried in legalities and paper work, and somehow my projects seem like a whim from a distant past.

Still, it is a beautiful spring here in NJ. My peonies and foxglove and iris are blooming profusely, and my cat entertains us with his annual boost of spring energy as well as doing double duty enduring our attentions not only for him but also for our recently deceased dog. That’s life.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — the lion lies down with the lambs

In the midst of my grief and what seems like endless paperwork a friend sent this anonymous saying:
“Being happy doesn’t mean life is perfect. It means you’ve decided to see beyond the imperfections.”

So, I’ve returned to working on my Deborah Newton “Greenhouse tank” and to my large Nantucket basket. I’m juggling my time visiting my mother and getting her new apartment furnished, searching for all the paper work to file my father’s taxes for last year, and getting ready for a week at Becky’s Vavstuga! If you want to follow the basket making procedures go to my basket link above.