Category Archives: tapestry

30 Words for Wind

Posted on April 9, 2014 | 1 comment

….and some artistic views of it… let’s start with Winslow Homer.

He captures just how I feel at anchor today. Luckily no sharks circling the boat just now, but otherwise these are pretty much the conditions here today.

We are stuck in another cold front with strong westerly winds, a direction that makes it hard to find good protection in this part of the world. We are in Elizabeth Harbor on Great Exuma, but since it is a huge bay there is far too much room for wind and waves to build. We are yanking so hard on our anchor that it’s hard to imagine either the anchor or the bow of the boat surviving this without damage.

I have made references to words for wind almost every time I have talked about sailing. As I’ve said many times, ‘zephyr’ is my favorite wind word, and I’d really rather not sail in anything but a zephyr. We haven’t seen a single one this winter.

One of the first things I learned about words when I began studying them, is that if there is not a word for something, like oak tree, in a language, that’s a sure sign that no oak trees grow where that language is spoken. Duh! And of course the opposite is true! If there are 30 words for wind in a language, you can bet they have a lot of wind. Like the Inuit and words for snow.

I have no idea which language has the most words of wind. I remember hearing that ancient Greek has 30 words for it… maybe that was just a catchy phrase in Greek courses in the 70…but it has stayed with me for four decades.

I am utterly tired of the wind this winter. It’s been spring for three weeks now, but we are still having these winter cold fronts down here with strong winds. Bob just heard from his weather router this morning that there are at least two more weeks of this clocking wind headed our way.

Here is Sarah Swett’s marvelous “The Hut on the Rock, the Sea.”…. look at those calm waters!…..look at that lovely coracle!…..it’s hard for me to imagine a more idyllic time on the water than this. I haven’t experienced a moment like this in so long I cannot remember.

And here is Barbara Heller’s “All the Diamonds.” She’s done a beautiful job rendering the brilliant points of light on water …..again not something I’ve seen in a while since it’s always blowing a gale here.

Best of all, this tapestry by Sarah Swett depicts my idea of a perfect day: my feet firmly planted on dear Mother Earth, admiring the lovely water view….while knitting! What could be better?

It’s inspiring to see what a couple of wonderful artists can do translating lovely moments on the water. I just have to cling to the belief that there might times like this ahead for me.

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Posted in inspiration, sailing, tapestry, Uncategorized

Into the Final Month

Posted on April 4, 2014 | Leave a comment

We’ve spent the last three days or so sailing, and sailing hard. It’s not much fun when the wind is ahead of the beam, which means we are sailing into it. Pandora goes like a bat out of hell, but heeling a lot, and that means sailing hard on her side. Since this is also our home, it’s not much fun to have all our stuff bashed about hard to one side. We batten things down, and put away as much as we can, but I can still hear all the stuff in the cabinets tumbling around. There is precious little glass onboard, as you can imagine!

The sights are lovely, as you can see, but the wind continues to be challenging. We have spent the past three days with some wonderful friends on board a very comfortable catamaran called Nati. And we’ve just said goodbye to other dear friends on Ariel. That’s life onboard. Unlike living on land, when your house location changes all the time, your friends change too. Luckily, we bump into friends now and then all along the way.

A day spent on Joe’s Sound with our friends from Nati. We walked some beautiful white beaches, dinghied into mangrove flats, and had a lovely dinner of perch from a lake in the Adirondacks that Anne and Dick cooked up for us. How amazing is that? They had a friend visit who brought them frozen perch, and venison that he had killed himself while hunting and fishing in the Adirondacks. What luck for us to get to have some perch!

We are back in Thompson Bay, planning to go ashore shortly for a walk and ending with happy hour and hamburgers at the Long Island Breeze. Tomorrow we have reserved a car and will do a little touring of the southern part of the island, ending the day with dinner at Chez Pierre, a bit north of here, where we had a lovely dinner watching the sun set last year. I have high hopes for an equally great dinner and sunset there tomorrow evening!

As usual, when when the winds are calm I try to weave…. slow, but steady progress on my ‘toyland.’

It is 31 days until I fly home. I wonder what this last month on board will bring…..hopefully some long awaited fair weather and calm seas!

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Posted in sailing, tapestry, travel

Hardly Spring

Posted on March 28, 2014 | 1 comment

We are into the first week of spring, but it still feels like winter. We finally made it south to Georgetown on Great Exuma, a great jumping off spot for going further south, but the weather has us pinned here. Georgetown is the largest settlement in the Exumas by some factor of 10 or so! It’s where everyone gets last provisions before heading into the remote regions beyond.

So we are wiping through our newly acquired provisions just sitting here in a very bumpy anchorage. I am surely getting tougher at bumpy conditions, as I attempt to continue work on my little tapestry.

One day, we were visited by this turtle numerous times. Considering how shy turtles are, how quickly they disappear whenever we reach for our camera, we were amazed that this guy kept diving down and returning to look at us yet again. He hung out with us for quite a while. It’s our first successful photo of turtle after years of attempts! We think this is a green turtle, but what fascinates me about them is how beautifully golden they are. They seem to have their own light as they glow right below the surface of the beautiful waters here. I wish we could have captured that in the photo. You cannot imagine how this guy glowed like golden sunlight as he floated near us. Stunning!

Yesterday we spent a little time onshore Stocking Island (across from Great Exuma) and had lunch at St. Francis resort and then a walk on the ocean side beach, where the waves were truly impressive. Seeing the force of the Atlantic made me quite thankful for our sheltered anchorage, even if it is considerably less ideal that I would prefer!

Here is the view of the anchorage off Stocking Island from St. Francis’s outdoor dining deck.

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Posted in sailing, tapestry, travel

Creative Outlets

Posted on March 22, 2014 | 1 comment

Sometimes while we are hiding out from storms the waters are actually calm enough for me to work. It hasn’t been often! On good days, we tend to set off sight seeing and shell collecting, but on others I manage to get a bit of work done!

TAPESTRY

I started my tapestry idea (a shelf of spools) a few weeks ago by doing some sampling, and learned a lot by the time I unwove the whole thing. I’d done about eight spools at that point and had worked out that I wanted the circles to be all different sizes and different shapes, and the little cardboard tubes and empty space inside the tubes to be fairly (but not perfectly!) consistent.

This is the first tapestry I am making without a cartoon! …. it is very freeing! Archie Brennan is always talking about the ‘open journey,’ by which he means not making too many decisions ahead time, letting the work at hand determine what should come next, and this is my first attempt at that. I’m doing the same with color choice, choosing colors based on what has just been done. Naturally, I wish I had a lot more choices onboard with me, but so far I have not been disappointed to make do with what I have.

I am facing my blank warp and creating as I go. I do ink on a freehand circle or two before I weave, and each circle I draw is based on the circles that have come before them, and each color choice for the circles is based on the colors I’ve already used as well as the loose ‘plan’ of where I hope to go. This is really a fun journey…..I would call it a tapestry vacation! A little side trip along an untraveled road (for me) with lots of beautiful scenery! A playland!

KNITTING

My other big project onboard is a sweater that was posted on Pinterest with a link to Ravelry.

When you click on the floral sweater photo on Pinterest you get directed to this sweater on Ravelry.

The floral sweater is far more appealing to me than the little squares version! Finding the origin of this sweater was a bit challenging, but when I get focused on something I can be a bit maniacal.

The little squares pattern is by Ruth Sorenson, and her directions call for 480 grams of Kauni Effekt “Rainbow” (EQ). I had planned to use traditional Shetland Fair Isle construction for a loose fitting jacket with front opening, and I decided to increase the amount of yarn to 600 grams. With a little searching for the thistle pattern I found this designer, who used the thistle pattern for a shawl she calls “Mrs. Barrista,” which was available for purchase in English. Bingo! (I don’t know if she is also the designer of the sweater, but it’s not on her blog.)

After doing a gauge swatch and determining that I’d use 10 repeats of the thistle pattern for the body, I cast on for corrugated rib and steeked the front opening, and have just been zipping along up to the armholes. Now I am at the armhole openings and thought I’d better make a plan.

While traditional Fair Isle construction makes for such easy knitting, it is not the most flattering look on me. I look better in sweaters that have a bit of armhole shaping, and even more importantly I need sloped shoulders. These two issues that are quite important to me will necessitate some fiddly knitting. Here is my sketch.

I will bind off an inch or so of stitches at the beginning of the armscye and start the steeks. When I start the sleeves I will pick stitches along the armhole opening, and I will work back and forth (HORRORS!) until I fill in that 1” of bound off stitches, and then I can resume knitting in the round down to the sleeve cuff. It will only be fiddly for about a dozen rows or so…maybe less…

The other fiddly bit will be making my shoulder line sloped. I have not yet settled on a definite plan for that, but I think that may also require working back and forth for the last several rows at the top of the body. It shouldn’t be that bad! I’m forging ahead with the sweater since I don’t need to worry about the shoulders for a while. Maybe something else will occur to me by the time I get to there! I am thinking of making a short row plan…

If there are any knitters out there reading this, please weigh in on what you’d do if you were making this sweater! I could use some input!

COOKING

I wonder how many of us use cooking as a creative outlet, especially when we can’t do what we really want to do! I enjoy the challenge of cooking down here, where getting food is a hit or miss scavenger hunt. Thursday, I happened to hit the pink store in Staniel Cay as they were bringing in fresh produce from the mail boat. I got both fresh mushrooms and a head of cabbage on the same day! (Only someone traveling down here can appreciate the rarity of fresh mushrooms in the Bahamas!)

Cabbage, which I hardly ever eat at home, is quite a staple down here, and it always brings back great memories of cooking in college with my brand new edition of the Moosewood Cookbook. It had a catchy name I no longer remember, but I do remember that the Russian cabbage pie was one of my favorite meals from that book. Thank you, Molly Katzen! I’m sure I could have googled the recipe if only I had internet. Since that was not an option, I had to do the best I could on memory alone.

I remembered the pastry crust had cream cheese as well as butter. So I made a crust with 4 TB butter and 4 oz. of cream cheese. I made 4 hard cooked eggs, sautéed the mushrooms and set them aside to sautee the cabbage that had been salted and left to wilt for about 20 minutes. I seasoned everything liberally with dill and a little salt and pepper. I layered all this in my pie shell, along with the other 4oz of cream cheese left in the brick.

Since I do not have a pie dish onboard I made this dish in my 9” springform pan. It has come in very handily as a substitute for many other pans. I’m glad to have it with me!

Dinner was delicious! Who knows how far from the original I have strayed, but we enjoyed it just the same! It does take a bit of doing to make something like this on a boat in a galley that is smaller than a NY City apartment kitchen. If not for the space it takes to pre-cook all the separate parts of this dish, I would definitely say this would become a staple meal on Pandora. It may become a staple in spite of the space challenge!

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Posted in inspiration, knitting, patterns, tapestry

A Month Aboard

Posted on March 3, 2014 | Leave a comment

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.

When all else fails, I bake!

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Posted in sailing, tapestry, travel, weaving

Warm and humid

Posted on February 3, 2014 | 3 comments

It was actually too hot today. It doesn’t seem possible! We drove only moderate distances for four days and went from single digit temperatures in Connecticut to what feels like the heat of a sultry August day. I almost wilted today…

My little copper pipe loom is not completely assembled yet or I would have had the perfect opportunity to warp it up today…. in the shade of the pavillion next to the building with the laundry room. I did four HUGE loads of laundry today and got a fair amount of knitting accomplished on my first Oktoberfest sock (instead of weaving little circles!). I am almost ready to turn the heel.

A couple of manatees were in the harbor today and one of them visited our boat for a while! He is gigantic, isn’t he?!!

There was a large turtle near our boat, and Bob declared it a freshwater turtle, so the water in this harbor must be fairly brackish. We watched the ibises congregate in the mangroves for the night…. it is such an impressive sight. There are lots of pelicans here.

I also worked on a bit of embroidery, something I haven’t touched in about a decade. All in all, it has been a very relaxing day… culminating with watching Renee Fleming sing the national anthem at the Superbowl (the only part of the game I watched!). Tremendous!

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Posted in knitting, sailing, tapestry

On the Road Again….

Posted on 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.

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Posted in family, tapestry, travel, weaving

Weaving Adventures

Posted on December 3, 2013 | 2 comments

I’ve neglected mentioning some of the events that have inspired me this fall. First would be the 18th century tapestry series titled “Weaving the Myth of Psyche” on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

There are some stunning images in these tapestries. Look at this donkey….

And the spinner….

And Cupid’s wing….isn’t that something? I am going to have some fun with this image!

The museum asked for some guild members to demonstrate tapestry that day, and three of us participated. Here one guild member is luring in the children with her spinning.

A couple of weeks later, the state guild meeting featured the boundweave work of Rebecca Arkenberg, called “Tales from the Loom.” Her boundweave figures are whimsical and creative, and it is obvious she is having a great time combining boundweave with a sense of humor. She said that people often can’t see what she is portraying, and she’s learned to let that go and just enjoy herself. What terrific advice!

Rebecca has a great knack for reducing world wide cultural images to the barest essentials.

This one is particularly fun! Navajo women, rugs, and Churro sheep!

And how about bunnies with angora tails sitting in rows of carrots and beets?

Cat and mouse….

A highlander in kilt!

The Scarlet Letter….

I had so much fun at this guild meeting and came away buoyed with ideas for returning to my own boundweave project that has been neglected for some time now!

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Posted in spinning, tapestry, weaving

Thanksgiving

Posted on December 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without some outdoor time, walking in the woods, putting the garden to bed, and (hopefully) having bulbs already planted. This is not the first time I’ve posted photos of these two lovely structures. There is moss growing on the cedar shakes of this pretty barn. I did not catch the light properly because (in real life) the moss was glowing vivid green in the soft light.

I can’t seem to walk by this house without taking yet another photo of it. It was a mostly grey holiday weekend, rainy and raw, but I seem to love the scenery along this walk in almost any weather.

The highlight of our walk yesterday was seeing the beaver that has caused so much destruction along the banks of this stream! He has not left a single tree untouched….busy guy! I was thrilled to see him, although I know you probably won’t! He reall is there, right in the center of the photo, just under the branches with the green leaves! Trust me!

Moss and lichen on rocks. Someday I’ll get just the right photo to begin a tapestry cartoon. This is intriguing, but the light is not quite what I saw yesterday.

At home I am re-mounting my Flax Spinner and getting a new silk warp ready for painting.

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Posted in dyeing, gardening, holiday, tapestry, Uncategorized

The Wednesday Group

Posted on October 7, 2013 | 2 comments

A perfect first week of October…. it started with the beautiful drive to Archie Brennan and Susan Martin Maffei’s studio along the Hudson River. The drive takes me north into Massachusetts and then west through the Berkshires. And although it was barely October the color was already reaching peak along parts of this drive! This month the Wednesday Group was quite large, 10 of us in all. That can be a challenging number to fit into Archie and Susan’s studio, large as it is! They have a generous enclosed porch that overlooks the Hudson, probably 40′ long with a wall of windows along that whole length. The views are amazing and distracting! Large ships bearing gravel power by throughout the day and night, and there is pleasure boat traffic as well.

A couple of us are very lucky to stay right nearby at the house of a friend. Doing this means we get to have home cooked meals at night and can bring homemade lunches to class. We eat like royalty and enjoy evenings sitting out on the terrace watching life on the river amongst the herb garden and fruit trees. This week the weather was warm and one evening, while having wine and cheese on the terrace we were entertained (and I was amazed!) by the loon-like call of a screech owl…..over and over… it was idyllic!

In spite of our numbers in class, we all seem to have gotten some good work done this month. It’s great to be together, and a larger group ensures that there is plenty of inspiration and good vibes flowing. I came home ready to get down to work!

….but WHAT work? I am working on a sample for some lengthy text, an excerpt from the Robert Frost poem, “Mowing.” This poem ends with: The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

And I’m thinking about a photographic image that Christopher took from the passenger seat of our new car while facing backwards. The photo was taken at dusk with with the fading light in the distance while cars are zooming along into the night, away from the light. The image has a lot of motion and light and dark in it….it intrigues me.

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Posted in inspiration, tapestry

Category Archives: tapestry

30 Words for Wind

Into the Final Month

Hardly Spring

Creative Outlets

A Month Aboard

Warm and humid

On the Road Again….

Weaving Adventures

Thanksgiving

The Wednesday Group

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Category Archives: tapestry

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