This week was a beautiful time to be along the Hudson River Valley. I drove up to participate in the Wednesday Group monthly class. It was a stunning drive there and back, and it was beyond wonderful to be back in class after being away for several months.
I took my spool tapestry, hoping to finish it or at least draw the finishing line across the top. After everyone took a look at it, the general consensus was to have a shaped ending. I really liked that solution, mostly because it meant I only had one more spool to weave! So….it is done!…well, except for all the finishing work.
Now I can get back to my medieval spinner and an intriguing idea that has been on my mind for a while.
In the mornings before class, and in the evenings, I was so lucky to stay in place with magnificent views of the Hudson…..and to be in the company of two wonderful friends. There is a lot of big ship traffic on the river, all day and through the night. Very impressive! And now that it is approaching summer there is plenty of pleasure boat traffic as well.
On Friday my friends and I took a trip to the eastern side of the river to visit the OMI Sculpture Park, in Ghent. First we made a quick stop at Frederick Church’s “Olana.” The Turkish inspired tile work is phenomenal, and I don’t know how all this tile work survives the climate here in upstate New York.
The views of the river and the Catskills were as compelling as the views of the house and grounds.
And there were gardens, bursting with poppies, peonies, and iris…
At OMI there was quite a bit of construction going on as they began installation of some new pieces. The older pieces mostly looked really dated to me. But in spite of the big equipment digging holes and moving artwork, and the noise, we managed to have a great time. The weather was perfect June….
Then, back at home, Bob and I took a walk along our own Connecticut River and enjoyed the beautiful gardens that are full of peonies.
My own deep red “Blaze” peonies have opened, right next to my “Knock Out Julia Child” yellow rose. It’s a glorious time in the garden these days!
While I’ve been writing this a sample of my huck lace fabric has been going through my washing machine. It has fulled nicely in the wet finishing (no dryer). I blotted it in a towel and have just ironed it. I’m happy to see that the pattern is square! Three yards to weave to make a lunch bag with matching napkin as a gift, and four napkins for me!
It’s been a good, productive day. I actually posted on Archie’s blog for the first time in longer than I will admit (although the dates are there for everyone to see….to my shame!). He and I have been working on things all along….just not posting. If you love tapestry check it out!
And I wove some plain weave on my huck threading to look for threading or sleying errors. All is well so it was time to peg up 50 bars for my pattern.
Notice anything wrong with this picture? I certainly didn’t…..until I’d gotten about the 2/3 through the pegging and ran out of pegs. So I went scavenging through my bars to undo some pegs. And that’s when I noticed that the pegs go in the flat side, not the angled side. So….out with the bad and in the the good. Almost twice the work, but at least it’s done now….
Just started to weave and the bars are not advancing well on the dobby arm. I’ll have my devoted handyman Bob take a look at it. Be back shortly…
Now it’s Monday… Bob got the dobby arm to work in one direction, but not both. The manual says not to fiddle with adjusting the dobby arm, but to call AVL for advice. Well, they are in California and I’m on the East Coast, so I could not call over the weekend, and cannot call until this afternoon. So, moving forward only, I tried the pattern. There were lots of misfires with the bars, but I managed to get two pattern repeats by going forward only. After wet finishing these diamonds will soften into rounded flowers. I am happy! Now, hopefully I can get the dobby arm to work properly so I can speed up a bit!
Yesterday there was a lovely event at a local historic farm in Old Saybrook. It was a wonderful way for me to celebrate being home and to enjoy the glories of spring!
The house at Bushnell Farm was built in 1678, and is the third oldest house in Connecticut (now I want to find the two older homes!). Isn’t it a beauty?
It is privately owned by a couple who live in my town, and they are doing a fantastic job of maintaining this property as well as continually bringing various areas of the farm back to the conditions of its early history.
Several times a year they open the property to the public free of charge. The spring opening celebrates the farm’s production of textiles which was such a vital part of life at that time.
One of the barns has a large loom in it dressed with linen toweling. There are a number of flax wheels, lots of tools for spinning and weaving, along with all the other tools and equipment that would be in use on a farm of this age. The Clarks have done a stellar job of collecting the daily items that would be in use on this farm.
For yesterday’s event the Clarks had arranged for two spinners from New Hampshire to come demonstrate at the farm. The first demonstration was on processing flax into linen, and it was the main event for me.
Gina Gerhard does 18th century textile demonstrations throughout New England and she certainly knows a great deal about growing flax, harvesting it and processing it for spinning into beautiful line linen. While I know the various stages of preparing flax stalks for spinning, I had never seen the entire process done live, right before me! Gina made it look easy, but she has had a lot of experience, and she was only processing one bundle for us. I’m sure an entire harvest would be a huge undertaking.
Amazingly, she grows her own flax, starting with about 5 lbs. of flax seed. In her area of New Hampshire an historic flax pond has been identified, and she hopes to use it in the future to rett (or rot) her flax bundles. At the moment she uses a large outdoor tub to rett her flax, and it takes about 4 to 6 weeks. Having a pond that can be dammed with shallow, still water with a bed of stones at the bottom gets the job done much faster, perhaps only 4 to 5 days if things are perfect.
Here is Gina holding one of her flax bundles. First the bundles were dried and then retted and then dried again. In her northern climate she harvests the flax in late Sept or Oct. Since that is not a great time for beginning the retting (rotting, and it does get stinky as it rots!) process, she lets the bundles dry over the winter and begins the retting process when the weather gets warm, like now!
The first step in preparing flax for spinning is breaking the flax stalks, which removes the outer and inner harder ‘straw’ that protects the fibers.
The next step is scutching which also removes more of the tough casings that protect the flax fibers within. Gina is standing next to a scutching board with her wooden scutching knife. The technique is to lay the bundle against the board and beat the bundle in a downward motion with the knife. It is a motion of beating and scraping down the stalks. She mentioned how often she sees these tools mislabeled in antique shops. She said the scutching knife is often labeled a toy sword!
Then she moved on to her hackle stand, a saw horse with three hackles attached to it (with bench dogs, my first exposure to these marvelous tools. Why has the modern world switched to C-clamps when bench dogs are so much faster to use and so much prettier too?). The first time I saw hackles I understood our phrase “getting one’s hackles up!” Sometimes an image is worth more than a thousand words!
This photo shows Gina’s three hackles (all up!), getting finer as she progresses through the hackling. Aren’t her bench dogs great?? I talked to the blacksmith in one of the nearby barns about getting a set.
When Gina was done hackling, she had a beautiful linen strick to spin. She could twist it into a bundle and continue processing other flax bundles, or she could put the the strick on her distraff and begin to spin.
The great take away lesson for me during this demonstration came now, dressing the distaff. I have never understood how to dress the ‘birdcage distaff’ that we see all the time. It just seems to me that after preparing this perfectly combed strick of linen putting it around the birdcage just gets too many of the fibers out of alignment. Then spinning only messes up the aligment further. Well, clearly I don’t understand it because it is the traditional way of preparing flax to spin. Luckily there are other traditions, and Gina uses a straight distaff on which she ties her strick so that it stays in a straight bundle.
Here are the two distaffs: birdcage on the left, straight on the right
Here you can see how she has tied her strick to her simple distaff and is preparing to spin by pulling out just a few fibers.
Gina describes her flax as good quality (and that is easy to see!), but not as fine as the linen grown in Belgium or northern France. She says farmers there have mastered what is necessary for producing the finest flax fibers, which includes sighting the flax field in a very sheltered place, safe from wind. Flax plants have very shallow roots and the plants can get knocked down by wind or driving rains. Once they are down they cannot be staked up again. In general, in northern Europe, summer weather is mild and rains are not violent in the way that our summer thunderstorms in New England can be!
Gina spins a yarn that would make a wonderful heavy weight smooth linen fabric. You can see just how few fibers she draws in to her yarn.
Along with her demonstration she had a lovely display of linen items. It was such a treat to see her working, to see her display and to get to know her. I hope our paths cross again!
Linen socks! I’m not sure I believe these are handknit!
And a close up of each of these beauties! First, feather and fan (okay, close up I can believe this was handknit):
…but not this one! Boy, I would love to try these on!
She had a plenty of linen fabrics to see and touch to show the difference in fineness and color. In the stack of three fabrics at the top of this photo, you can see a set of very fine, bleached linen handkerchiefs, followed by quite a coarse fabric woven of linen singles (perhaps tow linen), and last a heavy weight fabric of line linen which I believe is very similar to what Gina was spinning for us during her demonstration.
At the very bottom of this photo you can just see a bit of embroidery and the folded part of the fabric behind the embroidered edge. This fabric was wonderfully soft to the touch; it is a length of antique linsey woolsey. Wow!
So, that was the highlight of my visit! And of my Memorial Day weekend. I just want to get back to my linen spinning project! Gina has given me some great ideas on how to improve, and I’d like to get to it!
Meanwhile, other things were going on on the farm. Wool preparation and spinning, horsedrawn wagon rides, sheep shearing. Most of the out buildings on the propery were open. One of them has been set up as a general store, which is not original to the farm, but makes an intriguing display of 18th century items that the owners have collected.
Some of my fellow guild members were on hand demonstrating and showing their wares. It was great to catch up with them and watch them talk to onlookers. There was a great turn out for this event.
The sheep shearing was almost as thrilling as the flax demonstration. Certainly it was very thrilling for the sheep….they did their best to avoid it. The shearer was a woman, of very slight build, and rather young it seemed to me. She handled herself with such confidence, the sheep never gave her a moment’s trouble once she corralled each one. She sheared all the sheep, but I only documented the first one. She never made a knick on the sheep, and the two year old ewe was perfectly calm. Who wouldn’t love a face like this?
And so the shearing begins….
Moments into the shearing I realized I was watching a master, so I had to tape it!
Now it’s Sunday morning and I am full of ideas and inspiration from my day on the farm…. although I want to spin some flax, I am partway through making that colorful warp for yardage for the napkin and lunchbag fabric that is due at next month’s guild meeting. I’d better stick to that today!
It’s nice to have enthusiasm for so many fun textile projects! See you later, hopefully with photos of my finished warp!
As I write this Bob is ashore doing our laundry…..yes, it’s almost unbelievable, but I promise….it’s true. How lucky is that? We are in Black Point Settlement on Great Guana, where you can get a haircut and do your laundry and have conch fritters, all at the same place that overlooks the little bay where all the boats are anchored. I am suffering from a cold, the last person onboard to get it….just when I thought I had missed the nasty little germ. So I get to stay aboard and take a nap. Oh well.
This is where you sit to get your haircut while your laundry is going inside
After Chris left last week we had big plans to sail up to Compass Cay and spend a day or two shelling. On the morning we wanted to depart our anchor would not come up. While we were wondering what was wrong a large power boat arrived and anchored right next to us…..very close, which worried me because I had a bad feeling we’d get tangled with them undoing our anchor problems. The short version is that after trying to get the anchor up from different angles, Bob put on his shortie suit and free dived down about 25 feet to take a look. I have to add that he was in the throes of his own cold then so I know this was not his first choice of how to remedy our situation. He discovered that the anchor was caught on a limestone ledge. A second dive allowed him to tie a rope around the anchor (he was intending to pull it out by tying the rope to the dinghy and driving forward), but then, while he was down there, he thought he might as well see if he could just free it by lifting it with his hands. That worked….so when he hit the surface he let me know that the anchor was free.
In the fast moving currents, it didn’t take long for us to start skimming our way over to that big powerboat. So there you go! I was onboard alone at the wheel, Bob was in the water quickly getting left behind as he struggled into the dinghy and got the dinghy anchor up. I’m headed toward a 70-foot luxurious powerboat, and I’m dragging along a 65 lb. Bruce anchor as I go. Well, it was a lot of excitement, and I’m happy to report that there was no loss of life, or any other irreparable damage. Whew!
But all the yanking on the Bruce anchor before Bob went down to look a look, did cause some damage…. that long shank on the anchor used to be straight!
So instead of heading out, we motored a short distance to some nearby moorings and picked up one. Then Bob spent a couple of hours undoing our damaged Bruce and replacing it with a gargantuan Fortress that we keep onboard as a spare. By the end of that, with his cold raging, he was too tired to think of going anywhere….and that was fine with me too. I can only handle so much excitement in one day.
So, when we did finally tear ourselves away from Staniel Cay, we headed south to an idyllic spot that doesn’t seem to attract many visitors. Lucky us! We were the only boat at Bitter Guana, and it is quite a spot. I hope it continues to be unpopular! We were alone with a stunning white beach, a large limestone outcropping, and about 16 wild iguanas. The winds have been pretty calm, after a week or so of too much!
Speaking of wind: I have a love/hate relationship with it. Yes, a good breeze is just what you need when the temps get in the upper 80s F…. but far too often it just blows too hard down here. At anchor the boats roll from side to side and buck up and down (at the same time) and it’s about as challenging as being underway in rough conditions. It’s no fun. And the sound…. There comes a point when I’d give anything to turn down the volume. I just want some quiet. So wind is often the thing that is most challenging. Anyway…..just had to whine a bit about wind.
We’ve done a little shell collecting and illegal iguana feeding, and I’ve been suffering through my cold. Last night’s sunset gave us another green flash! That makes four so far! Last year we only saw it once!
Here’s what you miss when you sleep in due to being in a Nyquil-induced fog. It turns out there are lots of tropical long tails nesting on Bitter Guana along with the iguanas! They fly out in formation first thing in the morning and return at dusk. Sorry I slept in….
And about my projects: things are not as good as I’d first thought. In fact, I’m wondering if I am going to end up starting every single one of them over. I guess that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I do have the one Oktoberfest sock. And I have these two newly finished embroidery projects. They hardly count though, because each one only needed a few areas of work to be finished. I think both these little cross stitch projects have been languishing in a bag for about a decade …. And now they are finished!
I am on the fence about the tapestry. It has too much black space, meaning the space between the spools. That might work out for being at the top of the piece, but it seems to me that the spools on the bottom of a shelf are the ones that are the most crowded and perhaps even squashed into less round shapes. They are bearing the weight of all the other spools. I realize I could turn the piece upside down when it’s finished, but I’m also not happy with my first two spool colors, which are in the lower left so they would be upper right if I turned it upside down. I love to blend colors on the bobbin, but now that I’ve done a bit of work on this piece, I think what’s called for is unabashedly blazen, full saturation color. It’s a very graphic piece, lots of circles and circles within circles, and I think the shapes are quite happy shapes….so it needs happy colors. I’m not crestfallen about undoing the weaving….I’m just sad that there is so little time when the waters are calm enough to work. It’s a shame to spend a perfect, calm day un-weaving rather than weaving. Oh well.
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.
Now I can get back to my medieval spinner and an intriguing idea that has been on my mind for a while.
And there were gardens, bursting with poppies, peonies, and iris…
My own deep red “Blaze” peonies have opened, right next to my “Knock Out Julia Child” yellow rose. It’s a glorious time in the garden these days!
