Tag Archives: baskets

Work in Challenging Conditions

We are having a rip-snorting winter season in the Caribbean. I would prefer a gentle season, but there is no bargaining with Mother Nature. Actually, I know this weather is not her fault. It’s humanity’s fault, so I am partly to blame. I won’t go into the weather here, but you can see some pretty frightening images and videos on my husband’s recent post on SailPandora. We moved to the mooring field in Les Saintes one day before this storm hit, and it was a good choice for staying safe.

Not many days have been calm enough for weaving onboard, but I am trying. I brought so many projects onboard, and I feel compelled to make progress and even finish a few of them. If I finish two tapestries I won’t have to cart the looms home with me when I fly home in April. That’s a pretty strong reason to get them done!

I am trying my hand at wedge weave, and I started this project back in July under the tutelage of Connie Lippert at the NEWS conference in Worcester, Massachusetts. For some reason my brain gets confused on which direction the wedges travel and when to continue on the diagonal or move across the warp to create a horizontal section. I may have unwoven almost as much as I’ve woven, and I don’t seem any closer to making sense of the angles. Old age? I hope not!

During the July class I added the little gold rectangle woven in Gobelins style. While onboard I wanted to add a more complex bit of Gobelins style, so I wove the square that has a couple of shapes inside it.

Here is the one glorious day when I was able to weave in the fresh air in Pandora’s cockpit.

I have consulted Connie a couple of times along the way recently. Being outside the US makes me feel a bit disconnected which can also make me wonder if I’ve taken a detour away from where I need to go to acquire some skills at wedge weave. I’ve had an impulse to add a circle to the wedge weave. I pondered this, wondering if I’d have to weave an easier shape, like a square, in order to put the circle inside it. But that is not what I envisioned. I wanted a circle with the wedges abutting the edges of the circle. Connie thought I should give it a try.

I now have my circle!…but, my wedges are going in opposite directions. I’m not sure what will happen when the wedges meet above the circle. These wedges are confusing me!

In other news I’ve made some wonderful textile purchases. Bob and I took a day trip with friends while in Dominica, to visit the private lands owned by the Kalinago nation. They are not the original inhabitants of Dominica, but they certainly predate the European settlers. The European explorers named these people the Caribe. Naturally, they prefer the name they call themselves, Kalinago. Bob and I have visited here in past years. I’m intrigued by their lifestyle which makes such good use of plant life for food, remedies, and building materials. They are well known for their baskets, and this is my third time to collect more of their beautiful baskets, which are made from a reed like plant. They condition the reeds in different ways to give color the material. To make black they bury the reeds in a pit where the minerals in the soil darkens the reed. Our friend Bill got this photo of Bob and me trying to decide what to take with us.

Here we are sitting in the shade of the beautiful community where the Kalinago live. Oops! Actually, this is another day we spent together in Deshaies, Guadeloupe! We are with Bill and Maureen from Kalunamoo.

And since I’m adding photos from other days, here is one of my favorites with a number of our sailing friends who gathered for dinner that night.

On several visits to Dominica I’ve had my photo taken in front of a vendor’s stall called “Brenda’s Craft Shop.” This year I got meet Brenda! I bought a finely crocheted wrap skirt to give as a present. I can’t show you because it’s to be a surprise for a dear friend.

I tried my hand at an unfinished embroidery project I brought with me this year. On some days I simply could not line up the needle with the place I needed to insert it because of the rolling waves coming into our anchorage. It was daunting, and I often felt I might become crosss-eyed, but now I am happy to report that this project is finished! At home I hope to try my hand at framing an embroidery myself. This embroidery design is from an English company called Melbury Hill. They have some coordinating designs that go with these bluebells, but for now I need to stick to weaving those two tapestries.

As I write this we are on a mooring in the small archipelago of islands at the bottom of Guadeloupe. The main island is called Terre de Haute, and it has a charming village that entices many French visitors who arrive multiple times a day by ferry from Guadeloupe. There are some wonderful shops and many restaurants.

I must be getting tougher, or perhaps just more determined (desperate?) as I age. I am working on days I could never have worked in previous years. It’s good, and bad, in equal measures. I hope I will be taking a home a number of finished items in April.

Mend and Make Do

…a well used phrase from my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. It served them well through two world wars and the depression. It’s gaining favor again, as our affluent culture has had so much consumerism and so many things sent to landfills. Some of us are trying to make do with less, and repurposing the things we have. The culture of recycling things, reinventing uses, and making do has never gone out of favor in the small islands where Bob and I are living this winter. The people here have had no choice about that!

Bob and I are in Dominica now, the ‘nature island.’ Indeed, the rainforests here are as unspoiled and pristine as you could possibly imagine. It’s been just over two years since this island was flattened during hurricane Maria, which rapidly escalated to a category five hurricane. Bob and I visited here about two months after Maria occurred. The entire island was brown, with not a leaf left in the rainforest. Along with many other cruisers, we delivered tarps for use on houses and buildings that had lost roofs. Here we are again, barely more than two years later, and the rainforest is healed, but many man made structures are still covered with tarps that have decayed and shredded over the past two years. Patrickson Wallace, who was our guide for a day tour of part of the rainforest told us that he was without electricity for 10 months. At least he now has power and a real roof. Meanwhile, nature heals herself faster and more thoroughly. I am currently reading Overstory by Richard Powers. Being here is a wonderful environment for reading this book. The link will take you to Barbara Kingsolver’s review in the New York Times.

Dominica is a small island (17 miles wide by 29 miles long) that rises straight out of the sea with volcanic mountains covered in rainforest. This island has 365 rivers, and many waterfalls. A small group of cruisers that we’ve met over the past few years spent a day together with our guide to visit a number of waterfalls. We were lucky to be almost alone at Emerald Pool where we swam at the base of a tall waterfall.

Emerald Pool

Then we visited Trafalgar Falls and had lunch on a deck overlooking another waterfall that made us feel as though we were high up in tree house! We ended the day at a hot spring fed from volcanoes.

Trafalgar Falls
The view at lunch

I took a video of Trafalgar Falls, but I don’t have enough bandwidth to upload it. Hopefully I can get that done sometime soon from someplace onshore!

Another visit we took was to a small, family run chocolate factory. The estate grows both cocoa beans and coffee beans. The chocolate is made entirely by hand, and the daughter of the founder took us on a tour of the process. So… speaking of using what’s available…. the father and founder of this endeavor used wood from the property, that was mostly downed in hurricane Maria, to make a small living space above the chocolate sales area for his daughter. Wow! Sometimes making do turns into something spectacular. All the exterior wood–railings and shingles–and all the wood in the interior came from this property. The owner sold Bob two very nice boards of Galba, the local name for this hardwood. I will let Bob figure out if there is a more familiar name to us for what he got.

A romantic aerie with amazing views from the unglazed windows
Farewell to the Pointe Baptiste Estate

Onboard our floating house, Bob and I have done a moderate amount of mending and making do. Our refrigeration is failing. We need a new compressor, or perhaps an entirely new system. Our system is not made anymore, and Pandora has a 24v system since she was built in Finland. Someone in California is cobbling something together for us. He’ll ship it to St. Lucia sometime in the next fews days/weeks. We’ll sail there, and either Bob will install it or he’ll find a local technician to do it. In the meantime, we mostly buy each day’s food, and we plan to live off pantry items if (when?) it fails.

On a more personal level, both Bob and I have had to repair some of our clothing! We can’t just pop down the road to the local Marshalls or a local shoe store to replace the clothing that has fallen apart. I bleached one of my white shirts which had become dingy from so much sunscreen on the arms. Can you believe it? Sunscreen turns cotton a very odd yellow. I must not have rinsed out the bleach well enough because the fabric at the neckline just disintegrated while the shirt dried on a line. And of course the decayed fabric did not occur on a seam, and of course I don’t happen to have any white thread on board. I had to make peace with using pale blue thread for the repair. It’s not quite as discreet a mending job as I’d like. So another adage came to mind: if you can’t hide it, decorate it!

I do have quite a few colors of embroidery thread onboard, so I had another run (with running stitch) at poppies. I do love poppies!

Bob has found that his best walking shoes (Tevas) have delaminated on the soles….both shoes, not just one! He happens to keep some rubber cement onboard, so he peeled apart the layers of the shoes and used a small paint brush to cover each delaminated layer with rubber cement. In this photo he has just finished clamping the shoes, hoping that the pressure will make the glue adhere better. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow when he tries them out walking up to a Fort Napoleon.

Both Teva sandals are clamped together for get the rubber cement to take.

The first time I visited Dominica I bought small baskets with lids for the members of my basket group. I was told that the baskets were made here, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. And I didn’t ask enough questions! On this visit, I am seeing many more baskets!–some of them are exquisite. I asked some questions! There is a native culture here called the Kalinagos who live in their own community. They are known for making baskets out of a type of reed plant that some early native settlers brought with them from South America. The first of these settlers may have arrived on Dominica as early as 500 bce, a full millennia before the French claimed Dominica as their own in 1635. Along with baskets, the Kalinago make items out of gourds and coconuts, as well as making dugout canoes and throwing pottery.

The basket materials come from a reed plant called larouma. The reeds are shaved into 1/4″ staves and 1/8″ weavers, and are often dyed with natural dyes in brown, black, blue, and yellow to create designs with the natural tan. I’m so glad that I learned a bit more about these basket and the people who make them. If our refrigerator holds out a bit longer and if the weather keeps us pinned here, we’d love to visit the Kalinago Territory here in Dominica. Mother Nature will make that call for us.

We’ll see what the next few days bring. Our weather router predicts that we’ll be here in high winds for some time longer. Meanwhile, Carnivale will start next week in Fort de France, Martinique, and we hope to be there! We cannot make any definite plans since the weather controls our destiny. We’ll have to see what comes and make do.

Weaving Baskets…some progress

Nantucket purse (cherry), and small ebony Nantucket basket, both in progress

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I now have four basket projects in varying stages.  I need so much hand holding to make any progress that I fear none of these baskets will actually be finished any time soon.  Still, slowly, I’m learning a few things.

Here is one gem I  learned this week from my basket guru/teacher.  At home this month I had started weaving the ‘straight away’ on my Nantucket purse (on right in photo), and one quadrant of staves had begun to go off on an angle.  It was quite unsightly, drawing my eye right to the asymmetry of the weaving.  I was yanking hard to straighten those particular staves every time I came to that section of the basket, but it was not improving!  So I put the basket aside to wait for help from my teacher.  I thought she would tell me to un-weave, but she had a different suggestion!

It turns out I should never leave the basket ‘au naturel’ while I’m not working on it.  When I put it aside for any amount of time I should spray the staves with water, put on the heavy rubber bands, and then position all the staves as best I can.  The next time I weave those staves should stay straight, or certainly straighter.  At the end of weaving I spray and re-band for the next time.  It works!  I’m thrilled that I didn’t have to un-weave anything and that I’ve managed to keep the staves straighter now.  It’s certainly not a perfect basket, but I am happy with it!

I finished lashing on the rim of the  tiny Nantucket, but the day came to an end before I could attach the handle. Sigh... Why does time go so quickly at our monthly basket workshops?  I have the handle hardware assembled and waiting to be attached.  I don’t want to peen the handle rivets without some hand holding, so I just have to wait ’til June.

Lastly, I will spend some time this month shaping about 120 staves for a larger round Nantucket basket that I hope to weave while sailing in Maine this summer.  It occurred to me that weaving a basket could be a wonderful boat project.  However, due to my inexperience and lack of confidence, I want to have all the staves shaped and steam bent and in place around the base of the mold before I head off into the sunset to weave it by myself! I’ll start working on those staves today.

10" round Nantucket mold and "Japanese Wave Weave" covered vase

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Basket #4 is languishing, waiting for its rim.  It’s the tall cylinder that is a glass vase enclosed in basketry, woven with cane, waxed linen and beads in a pattern called Japanese Wave Weave.)

I really thank my stars that I have such a great teacher!