Author name: ozweaver

There should be no surprise that when I avoid chores as well as I have lately, they just pile up more and more.  I really love to make things and, for some reason, detest finishing things.  My little tapestry is still waiting to get the back threads trimmed and buried and have its warp ends finished in some way.  While avoiding this tedious chore I have been knitting the “For Irene”sweater.  As of this afternoon, it is now also completed and that means it also needs finishing.  Not sure which I detest more: finishing tapestries or sewing sweaters together.  Ugh.

I had one of the worst night’s sleep ever last night because of high winds blowing through our anchorage.  When the wind is blowing Pandora is much like an anxious dog.  She tends to tug as hard as she can at her anchor line, first pulling as hard to port as she can, which includes heeling over a bit.  Then she’ll pull hard to starboard and heel over there too.  Back and forth… all night.  When it gets really windy it feels like I might fall out of bed.   Who could sleep through that?

Shortly after we got up this morning a really nasty squall came through.  Our middle of the night wind was nothing compared to this.  Bob thinks the gusts probably hit around 70 mph.  We both thought we would drag our anchor right across the harbor and crash into either a mega yacht docked in any of the mega-mansion back gardens or one of the other traveling boats anchored along with us.  Other boats around us did drag rather significant distances, and we all felt lucky that no one bumped into each other.  Bob thinks we were probably a bit closer to one of the mega-mansions with mega-yacht than we had been the night before.  During the big blow there was a solid wall of horizontal water coming at us.  Poor Bob had to go out in the cockpit during this squall in order to keep vigil in case he had to deal with an emergency.  The whole storm lasted less than 30 minutes, but it was NO fun.

Afterward we saw some lawn furniture float by from one of the mega-mansions, and Bob saw what looked like the entire top of a palm tree in the water.

I have been meaning to mention that although I never did get afternoon tea at the Breakers, we did have a fun time there.  We did not find afternoon tea, but we made do with having an afternoon aperitif!  Most expensive drinks ever!  Bob had a draught beer and I had a glass of house wine, and the bill was over $30!  Still, there aren’t many places where the actual bar, where you rest your drink, is an aquarium, and right in front of you is a wall of glass for admiring the Atlantic Ocean.  Sometimes you have to pay for a view like this.

I’m pretty certain that the hotel is closer to the water’s edge than it was a decade or so ago when Bob and I stayed here for one of his business meetings.  Hmmmm….

This year is our first visit to Boca Raton.  We have anchored in Lake Boca before, but for some reason we did not go ashore.  Now we have seen a bit of what we’ve missed!  It’s a lovely town for walking….lots to do!  Naturally I found some gardens and houses that I couldn’t resist photographing.  The mailbox seems so completely out of place at this house.

I loved this pale lavender house with green plants and planters and the deep rust of the gate.  Great color choices!

We also happend on a beautiful florist along our walk.  The arrangements on display would have fit right in at the Breakers.  I guess lots of people have foyers on that scale.  For Pandora I just needed a tiny arrangement.  It was hard to decide between cut hyacinths or spray roses.  Finally it was the yellow and pink that won out over pale lavender and purple hyacinths….but it wasn’t easy to decide!

At the dinghy dock in Boca we saw a flock of very tame ibises who are used to having their photos taken.

Most interesting of all to Bob and me was that we found a Portuguese Man of War floating between the dinghy dock and the ICW bridge.  I think it’s pretty unusual for them to come in from the ocean.  Seeing it made me wish I had my big loom onboard so I could continue to work on my PMoW idea.  Sigh….  If you look closely on the left side of the creature you can see his tentacles.  Menacing tentacles!  I love what happened with the swirling water in this photo….very painterly!

So, now it is mid-afternoon and we have arrived in Ft. Laurderdale at the anchorage we have visited for the past three years.  It’s considerably more crowded than we’d like, and I keep thinking about squalls brewing.  It’s still quite windy and now the harbor is narrower and more crowded than Lake Boca, and I wish the wind would calm down a few notches.  Sewing my sweater together is not looking like such a bad chore now.  I think I’ll get on it.  Hopefully I’ll take photos soon!

 

First, I have to admit that I have forgotten to bring a LOT of important stuff onboard this winter.  Each week I am discovering something I meant to pack.  This does not induce confidence in my aging mental capabilities.  So the most recent thing I regret not having with me is Peter Collingwood’s book Techniques of Rug Weaving.  I need it for all the finishing options for the edges of my miniature tapestries.  I don’t even know the name of the edging I wanted to use.  After a decade of Archie and Susan style finishing I have very little experience of these other techniques.

I was hoping to find some instructions for Damascus edge, half-Damascus, and Philippine edging online, and certainly a few videos on Youtube.  But I didn’t!  I found a PDF of Collingwood’s book, but when I uploaded the file I found I only had the first 120 pages of the book, not the part with the finishing techniques!

Tommye Scanlin came to my rescue within moments.  First she sent me a scan of the half-Damascus technique which is the one I am most interested in doing.  And she let me know that the whole Collingwood book is available, in 4 pieces.  I had only gotten the first section.  Whew.  I’ll be back ashore later today to visit a wifi café to get the rest of the book.  Thank you, Ralph Griswold and Univ. of Arizona for making this available!

I spent the 2^nd half of yesterday enjoying downtown West Palm Beach!  What a spot!  There are some amazing choices for restaurants, so it was hard to choose just one for dinner.  There is a huge linen store full of stunning bedding and household linens.  Quite drop dead gorgeous….

The best find of all was a very large old fashioned fabric store, right in the center of the downtown area.  You don’t find that in many places these days.  It was a feast of incredible fabrics, from upholstery to fine silks for ballgowns.  Embroidered silks and linens and heavy upholstery fabrics, and aisles and aisles to walk down and swoon over endless ideas.

Here is an aisle of nautically inspired fabrics.

The aisles were arranged by color, and I might have had the most fun in the orange aisle!

There were two fabrics that happen to be fun weaving structures that I love.  This deflected double weave is my favorite, but I had to pass it by at $98/yd.

I also loved this design, but I reasoned with myself that I’d have more fun weaving it myself.

I could not pass up this incredibly happy blue onion china print on an orange ground.  This will become a large tote bag for me for spring/summer.  I could even get started on it now since Bob has his sailmaker’s sewing machine onboard.  I’d have to make peace with using sailmaker’s heavy Dacron thread, so I think I’ll wait.  I want to use the bright blue color of the onionware for thread….

So, if you ever find yourself in West Palm Beach, check out Mac Fabrics!

And here are some views of West Palm Beach at night.  Lovely!

Our view of West Palm from Pandora at anchor.

Today we will take a long walk across a bascule bridge to Palm Beach.  I will visit the famous Worth Ave and perhaps the Breakers for tea?  ….if they serve tea!  And then back across the ICW via another bridge and back to our little anchorage.

It’s still a bit chilly down here at the top of the Gold Coast of Florida.  Bob keeps posting photos on Facebook, saying how cold we are, and you can imagine the responses from friends living in New England!  They are NOT sympathetic!

However, we are cold!  Try living outside in 50-degree temps with near gale force winds.  There is no going inside for the day when you are under way; you simply must stand in the chilly gale in order to steer the boat and navigate.  Then after 12 – 14 hours of this you can go down below which is the same chilly temperature, but at least without wind, and try to warm up.  In the long run we get into bed each night as cold as we’ve been all day, and get up each morning still cold.  Oh!  And I should mention that at least half the days onboard there is no hot water, so I also have to wash up with 50-degree water in my tiny 50-degree head (boat-ese for bathroom).  It’s not all bliss down here!

But I admit it looks pretty blissful….Pandora on a mooring in Vero Beach….she’s the boat at center in the distance.

But the sea life, the birds and the plants don’t seem to be suffering.  We still see dolphins playing around us every single day as if life is very good indeed!  Yesterday Bob missed the most exciting photo opportunity of this year. We were several miles offshore, sailing from Ft. Pierce to Lake Worth, and at one point we passed a giant sea turtle!  It was right near the boat! The turtle’s shell was almost 5 feet in diameter, and his head was like a cantaloupe!  Bob said he raised his head and looked right at Pandora!  I missed this auspicious moment because I was in a stugeron– induced fog due to always being seasick when we are offshore!

Such lush ivy growing on a wonderful tile.  The climate is certainly mild enough for tiles outside!

Doesn’t this palm frond make a lovely headdress for Bob?

 Every year Bob and I plant a window box of herbs and flowers that becomes my little garden onboard.  It’s my one little connection to life on land.  This year I could not get to my favorite nursery in Ft. Pierce, so I’ve had to make do with plants from the Lowes that was right on the bus route in Vero.  I’ve got a small mint and parsley plant and two red geraniums.  I hope they will thrive as well as the plants in previous years.  This little bit of green and red makes me so happy!

I need to knuckle down on my little landscape tapestry.  Time is growing short if I am to finish this in time to send it off to Scotland for an exhibit of miniature tapestries called “Postcards from Home.”  First it will travel to New Hampshire where it will be boxed up with other tapestries before it goes on its journey across the Atlantic.  Doing this piece has made me realize that I’d like to do a series of miniatures based on the changing scenery we find as we head south each winter.  It will be a nomad’s view of winter along the US East Coast.  But first, I need to stop weaving/unweaving and just finish #1 of this series!  At this point I am not ready to photograph it!  It still has so much that disappoints me….hopefully soon it will be looking better.

And I’m making good progress on the Carol Sunday sweater, “For Irene.”  There was a glitch with the sleeves, but once again, Carol came to my rescue very quickly.  I had gotten an email ages ago saying there was a corrected version of the pattern available with a link .  When I followed the link and downloaded the new pattern I really couldn’t see any differences between the two, but I figured I just wasn’t looking carefully enough.  Well, it seems I have two copies of the un-corrected pattern.  Carol very nicely sent me the corrected pattern as an attachment.  It does mean that I had knitted most of a sleeve where I kept fudging the lace pattern in order to get it centered.  I have set that aside to knit the correct version and am now nearing the end.  I will then rip out the first sleeve and knit it again.  If I can just make some good progress on my little tapestry I will get this sweater done in no time!  And if it does get done soon I’ll be wearing it too!

Bob and I vacuum packed our down coats and wool sweaters about a week ago.  We regret that but haven’t yet taken the plunge to dig them out.  We did UN-vacuum seal one of our blankets though since we’ve been very cold at night after all the long hours of standing in the wind and chill each day. That means we hae 3 lightweight blankets on us at night! Anyway, I’ll be happy to have another new sweater to wear!

I’ll close with this morning’s sunrise.  I was up for it, but it was Bob who took the shot!

We are now in Cocoa, Florida, just past Cape Canaveral.  The space coast of Florida is delightfully mild, and we are beginning to thaw!  Saturday was the first day of sunshine we’ve had since getting onboard Pandora, and the feeling of warm sun on my face was glorious!

We left New Smyrna yesterday and arrived in Cocoa mid afternoon.  Both towns are very charming with pretty parks right at the water’s edge, pretty pastel colored low, stucco buildings and historic bungalow style houses along quiet residential streets.  Cocoa’s waterfront park was teeming with families yesterday, and I realized it’s a 3-day national holiday this weekend to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.  And even though the town was bustling with folks who could enjoy their Sunday without worry of what Monday would bring, the residential streets were still very quiet.

This first image is actually a small church on the corner of the street with so many pretty bungalows.

It’s funny to me that when I get ashore I spend a lot of time walking through residential streets and snapping photos of houses and gardens.  I think I really miss life on land!

Along the waterway near New Smyrna there are lots of small estuaries, full of mangroves, and nesting/hunting grounds for a wonderful selection of water birds and sea life.  While we were underway, Bob saw a number of baby dolphins swimming alongside their mothers. And we saw colorful crabs tucked into the roots of the mangroves.  I did not know crabs came in such brilliant colors!

I love how pelicans fly in formation together.  Bob took this photo right before sunset when the pelicans are glowing with the last of the light.

We waited ages for this ibis to take flight, and then when he did all our photos are blurry!  It was a beautiful sight!  You’ll have to trust me on that!

Isn’t this crab amazing?  I had dreams last night about giant crabs in vivid colors…..

The highlight in the town of New Smryna was a beautiful gallery of pottery and stained glass right along the residential street at the edge of the harbor.  It is called Clay Gallery, and you must pass through a stunning garden before you get to the galleryn entrance.

What a lovely spot!  And they have a wonderful beehive oven, very similar to what Bob has been wanting to make for our house.  Great inspiration for him to get started this summer! I particularly love the shells imbedded in the mouth

I have been avoiding my computer problems by knitting.  I have been knitting for a ridiculous number of hours each day and am racing through the front of the pretty “For Irene” sweater by Carol Sunday.  I knitted the back of the sweater while traveling in Portugal, in the fall, then put is aside to finish up the Merle sweater to wear during the cold weather we’ve had while onboard. I got myself in trouble at the beginning of the front of “For Irene” doing the short rows, and with internet so unpredictable on a boat, and with the fear that I might wait days for an email response from Carol, I decided to call her!  I felt quite uncomfortable about this, but I really needed to keep knitting so I wouldn’t have to face the overwhelming job of sorting through photos and files on my computer.  She actually has her phone number posted on her website, and I could not resist getting instant gratification for my questions.

I want to wear this sweater to a wedding in the spring.  The wedding is 3 months away, which may sound like ages….but not in my circumstances!  I need to know if the sweater will be flattering on me with enough time left over to determine if I can find anything to wear with it as we travel south along the coast.  That’s a tall order! So 3 months is not that much time to pull an outfit together from a boat!  I don’t have the luxury of a car, so I only have access to whatever is available in the little shops along the coast.   Mostly these shops have beautiful clothing for beautiful people…..who wear a size 2!

Anyway, Carol actually answered her phone!  And she was patient and friendly with my questions.  And of course, my problems were entirely my fault, nothing to do with the pattern.  I cannot convey how thankful I am for her immediate help because I had an entire day of knitting and managed to start the front over again and make it all the way past the armholes!  I am making this sweater in Phildar Cotton 3 because I want to wear it in the milder months.  The colorway is “Eben” (#223), a warm medium brown, which I hope will look nice with either cream or pale blue silk pants.  I am changing the pattern a bit below the armholes (it is a top down pattern) by increasing one stitch at each edge every 8 rows, and then every 12 rows, to create more of an A-line tunic. I also intend to change the sleeves to 3/4 length, so I can actually do stuff while wearing the sweater.  I love the idea and the look of sleeves that drape below the wrist, but it just doesn’t work for my lifestyle!  I cannot cook… or eat… while wearing long, flowing sleeves, and there you have it!…in a nutshell!…. why I don’t wear a size 2!

I sure hope I like the finished garment!  It’s so nice to have a flattering sweater that you have knitted for yourself!