It’s the penultimate day of March, and April is on my mind. I am homesick and a bit under the weather, and I can’t think of anything better than being in Connecticut right now! I’m sure the buds on the daffodils are swelling, along with the buds on the many tulip poplars in the area.
I came down with a cold a few days after our return from Havana. It’s pretty rare for cruisers to get sick, and when we do it’s almost always from having contact with people ashore. I have no idea why cruisers don’t often get sick.
We’ve spent several days walking all over Cienfuegos. One day we walked 8 miles, and two other days we walked between 6 and 7 miles—in terrible heat. So for the past two days I have just stayed onboard working on projects and trying to stay cool. There has been a flotilla of little jellyfish in the harbor, so no swimming. A cold shower in the late afternoon has been quite refreshing. Sometimes we run our Honda generator at night in order to run the air conditioning! Luckily the people on the boats nearby us have all been taking shore trips and are not onboard listening to the Honda run.
On Sunday afternoon Bob noticed one of the Windjammer schooners from Maine enter the harbor. It’s the Harvey Gamage. They are here looking into ideas for educational programs. Meanwhile, Bob is thinking of ideas to get them to visit Essex.
Bob has been onboard a couple of times, and both of us were invited for lunch yesterday. What a galley. That big cast iron stove takes over an hour to preheat. That would be lovely on a chilly morning in Maine, but baking is no fun in the current Cuban heat wave.
The communal dining table where we ate lunch. That’s a big chest freezer at the bottom of the photo. We contributed a bottle of coke, a bag of ice and a package of chocolate chip cookies to the lunch. Not very exciting, but the crew have been missing ice (couldn’t they make a ton of it in that huge freezer?) and American Coke and Keebler cookies.
During our last sail from one of the cays to Cienfuegos I dug out some yarn I’d brought to make a sweater. Before I left home I bought some yarn from the Canadian mail order company Elann.com. They were having an Amazon special on full bags of an Australian merino DK weight yarn that they call Embrace DK. It is processed (superwashed) and spun in China, and it will be a while before I know what I think of that!
Last year I knitted the sweater called “Baby Cables and Big Ones Too,” by a Finnish designer Suvi Simola.
I wanted to wear the sweater against my skin so I last year I bought some Cascade pima cotton yarn that gave the right gauge for this sweater. The sweater is knit from the top down, which means you can try it on as you knit. I did try it on along the way, and I was happy with what I was getting, until I got almost all the way down to the hem. By that point the cotton yarn could not support the weight of itself, and the thing hung on me like a rag. The neck, which is a very pretty raglan rectangle, was distorted by the weight of all that cotton. It was NOT pretty.
So, last fall as I packed up things to put onboard, I ripped the needles out of that sweater and grabbed the bag of Elann Embrace DK. They got stuffed in the back of one of the cabinets on Pandora, and I promptly forgot all about it…until last week.
As we sailed to Cienfuegos I began the sweater. The yarn is soft and the label says it will not pill. The color I chose is Wedgewood blue. I have now finished the body and have tried it on a couple of times in order to redesign the hem. I like it! I have opted not to make the shaped waistline, but began some increases at the side ‘seams’ (there are no seams since this is knit in the round) to make my version into an A-line shape with little tab openings in garter stitch before doing the garter stitch ‘hem’ at the bottom. I am happy with this look.
Now I am also redesigning the sleeves. The sleeves on the original look long on some of the models, and too-long sleeves are one of my biggest pet peeves. You can’t do anything in a garment with sleeves that are too long. They just get in the way all day long, and get downright disgusting if you try to eat anything…and cooking is impossible. Yes, they always look so feminine on the models wearing these garments, but no one can actually live in clothing with sleeves that droop down your hands.
So I’ll just have to see how the sleeves work out. I’m not planning to do the big long cable on one sleeve. I think I will do a one of the delicate little cables (Cable B, in fact) on both sleeves that should not go much beyond the garter cuff. Since the sleeve is knit in the round from the shoulder down I won’t be dealing with placing the cables until I near the end. The cables on the body are asymmetrical, so I’ve decided to make the sleeves match each other.
Starting the first sleeve:
I haven’t done much else. It’s been too hot to for dragging out my big tapestry loom, but I certainly miss it. My hands are too hot for the tiny manipulations required for tatting. And it’s actually been too hot for the wool yarn I’m using in the sweater, but I have to do something! Not counting the matching sweaters I made for my sons when they were young, this is the first time I’ve knitted a sweater pattern more than once.
Bob and I are now watching for a weather window to head further west. It looks like Friday and Saturday may be good days for heading out. We will stop in a couple of Cayos on our way to Havana. Our visas run out during the first week of April and I hope we can get them renewed easily in Cayo Largo.
