travel – Page 5

Back At It!–in Umbria, Italy

November 13, 2024 | 5 Comments

This is quite a thrill for me to access my website and write a new post. This site has been ‘sick’ for about six months, and I have not been able to access it.

It would be quite an epic if I tried to cover all the things that I’ve thought about, done, and struggled with over the past six months, so I think my best option is to just tackle a few vignettes, starting with my trip to Italy in October.

I went to Italy for a natural dyeing and tapestry weaving workshop at La Romita, which is in Umbria. I asked some of my students if they’d be interested in joining me, and my weaving friend Jody decided to go. The two of us quickly made friends with two experienced natural dyers, Yonat and Kris, from California. Part of the workshop description was that we would meet local dyers and weavers, but there were no dyers on our list of day trips. We decided to skip one of the trips and rent a car together to drive north to visit the workshop of Elena Villa in Castiglione del Lagos, a walled medieval town on the shore of Lake Trasimeno, where she sells her hand-dyed yarns and various finished items, like knitwear and dyed scarves.

We’d been warned that we’d probably have to take a car with manual transmission, and since I was the one who’d most recently driven standard cars, the driving fell to me. It had been about two years since I’d done that, although I’ve driven standard transmission cars for most of my driving life, so I was a bit nervous. A strange car with a standard transmission in a foreign country–but as luck would have it, we got a big American car with an automatic transmission. I have a sense that it was because Valerio, who took us to the Avis agency in Terni, pleaded our case with the staff there.

The trip was a cinch with Google maps, and we all had a terrific day. I think we were the biggest car on the road–not my first choice!

And here we are! Elena opened her shop for us that day although she is normally closed on Thursdays. Lucky for us.

Elena is in the foreground, with Kris (R) and Yonat (L) looking through yarns. Can you imagine how much we were swooning over all these wonderful items in such stunning natural colors?

Elena’s husband took a wonderful memento photo with the lake behind us. It was such an exciting experience to meet her and to see her work. Elena recommended we go to a certain restaurant before heading back to La Romita.

We left feeling inspired and ready to create things with the yarns that have such lovely blended gradations of color, as only natural dyes give. I found a whole shelf of merino yarn fine enough to use in tapestry.

The colors are:

Solidago (golden rod) a bright gold on the merino yarn and softer yellows on the three scarves
Solidago with “Robbia” (madder), the salmon/orange
Solidago with “Cipolla (onion), the orange/rust/yellow/gold/green variegated yarn.
Fitolacca (pokeberry!), which is havested more than once from spring through late summer, giving different colors as the season progresses.
Noce (walnut, although I don’t think walnut trees grow in Italy), medium, warm brown.
Galle di Quercia (oak galls), medium grey. I bought three skeins of this because I thought it would be a great neutral.

Lunch was another rare surprise for the day. When we entered the dining room we discovered the terrace overlooking the lake. Beautiful!

It’s so rare to have photos of myself because I am usually behind the camera. The photos that include me were all taken by Jody. It’s great to have a record of being here. Here is our terrace lunch with a view of Lagos di Trasimeno.

It was a magical day, the best any of us could have imagined. I bought some fiber from local Appeninica sheep that Elena had dyed with golden rod. I didn’t have a spindle with me, so Elena went home to get one of hers and delivered it to me while we had lunch. I will never forget that! Now I have to think of something remarkable to do with this yarn.

I spun this wool on both the spindle I got from Elena and, once home, on my Nano 2 e-spinner. The spindle spun yarn is on the right and is finer and more loosely spun than the skein on the left which is I what I spun on the Nano 2. I plied both these skeins on my folding Lendrum.

I just read about Appeninica sheep on Wikipedia. They are a modern breed, first established in 1970s, and based on quite a few other breeds. They are raised mostly in Umbria and Tuscany and were bred to do well in the Apennine mountains. Their wool is considered medium/coarse. That was not my impression of the roving I had. Perhaps the golden rod softened it a bit. Who knows?

It’s exhilarating to travel, and even more so when we can branch out and explore the exact thing we are most interested in experiencing. The four of us became good friends during the workshop, and we feel we made a great connection with Elena and her stunning shop.

Winding Down

March 29, 2024 | 1 Comment

It’s the last weekend in March. We fly home on Monday, April 1st. It’s been a difficult winter season in a number of ways, and weather has been part of that. This part of the world is in the trade winds where the winds are predictably East. To have West winds at all used to be quite rare. This year it was a regular thing. And then there were tragedies: three deaths of sailors in the space of only three months.

But whatever the weather and whatever other circumstances block our path, the Caribbean is always colorful. Beautiful dawns and sunsets greeted us every day, with daily rainbows after the rain showers. Twelve years ago when we returned from our first passage to The Bahamas, an old friend asked me if my color palette had changed based on spending so much time in tropics. All these years later, I can answer that Caribbean colors have definitely found their way into my palette–clothing, tapestry, fabric weaving and yarn spinning, knitting.

Here is a particularly lush image from Martinique. We are in the rainforest, but also note the colors in the mineral water flowing over that cliff. There are hot springs here where you can ‘bathe’ for a fee. We are with two couples, one we’ve known for years, and other new cruisers this year.

Here is a rare moment in St. Pierre when the summit of Mount Pelee is visible. It’s normally always hidden in the clouds, one of the iconic places that gave credence to the phrase that these islands are “the islands that kiss the clouds.”

A view of the harbor in Deshaies, Guadeloupe, from the botanical gardens. Pandora is

somewhere in the mix.

Sunsets and last light are always a beautiful time of day, everywhere in the islands. Bob took all these photos because it’s his favorite time of day and A favorite pastime to record it.

I have an endless number of photos of houses, doors and windows in beautiful Caribbean colors, but WordPress won’t let me post them. I haven’t confronted this before. I’ve spent years posting images of private houses on my blog, so I don’t know what has changed. So I’ll only post one of this beautiful flowering plant.

This is the church in the center of Fort de France, Martinique. It’s brilliant to me that the building across the square has mirrored glass that reflects the front of the church. Stunning! The church is one of the iconic buildings designed by Pierre-Henri Picq, a student of Gustav Eiffel.

Plants grow everywhere there is bit of water and space, even a tiny space.

When I arrived in the Caribbean this winter one of my goals was to finish this tapestry that I started back in July, in a workshop with Connie Lippert at the regional New England Weavers’ Seminar (NEWS). I wanted to insert some areas of ‘standard’ weaving, or Gobelins style weaving, into the wedge weave background. I wove the small green square with the internal shapes while onboard.

Some days I wove out in the fresh air.

About a week ago I cut the piece from the loom.

My first wedge weave experiment

I’ll do the finishing work at home. Connie recommended I place a wet cloth on top of this piece for 24 hours to bring out the wedge weave undulations. I’ll do that home next week!

A few weeks ago I had quite a bad moment of anxiety over this piece and the knitting I brought with me. I put this piece away for several days, and one day I woke up with the energy to undo some of it and try to get it finished. Maybe all I needed was a few nights’ sleep away from the daily thinking about and looking at this piece. I needed a break! But with two of the three sweaters I brought onboard, that same break only showed that they were ‘no-go.’ I managed to make peace with that and begin the process of unraveling, perhaps as a metaphor for this strange winter. I restarted the biggest of the sweater projects and am now happy to realize that I have passed the place where I began the unraveling. Now it’s forward motion toward a finished piece!

Typical of life in general, I take two steps forward and at least one step back. But there is progress in general, and a feeling of good work is the more important thing to realize. Projects onboard are either finished now or well underway. It’s time to wind down this journey and head home, where a number of new ideas are waiting for my attention, like sashiko-ori. I’m ready!

Work in Challenging Conditions

February 12, 2024 | Leave a Comment

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.

Janus

January 10, 2024 | 1 Comment

Ready or not, it’s 2024. I romped through the fall like a woman with her hair on fire, and I did manage to complete the loom woven projects I was determined to finish. I never managed to touch a tapestry loom. I’m not one who likes to look back and list all the things I didn’t accomplish, but every year I work hard not to do that. Here are some images of what I did finish! And I am celebrating!

For most of the fall I was in a class with Fran Curran to design a project entirely in linen. While thinking about napkins or curtains, or even just kitchen towels I remembered that I’ve wanted to weave some bread bags for a couple of years. Here was the opportunity, which I wrote about in my last post!

I love using these for my sourdough bread loaves.

Since I wove my project at home rather than at the Weaving Center where Fran’s class took place, I finished before the class was half done. So I started another linen project, which is also in my last post. This is a wonderful design called “Meta Weave” by Lisa Hill, which you can purchase her Etsy site. I don’t know any weavers who don’t love a design that looks like weaving within weaving! Her instructions are for kitchen towels, but I decided to make 6 napkins in sets of two colors each. I used blue that you can see above, before switching to red, then green, and I managed to get a 7th napkin in yellow. I also found that I preferred the underside of the design.

Five yards and seven napkins!

Okay! Enough of that. It’s been a long time since I’ve woven a project so quickly. It was amazing to zip through this project, especially after the drawn out experience of weaving the paper placemats that required dyeing twice and unweaving two placemats after they were cut from the loom in order to get back some of the paper weft in order to dye it! That was almost the limit of my patience, but not the limit of my stubbornness, which may actually know no limits!

Then, in mid-November, a good friend gave me a table loom dressed with a sakiori project, also known as ‘rag’ weave. She gave me the loom because she thought I might be able to shoe-horn it onto Pandora. It’s a special loom. It belonged to the oldest current member (96!) of our state guild, whose father made several of these looms for her mother. Sue, our member, had dressed this particular loom with a loosely sleyed cotton warp which she intended to weave with 1/2″ strips of quilting cotton. The loom came with a large stash of cut cotton strips. I didn’t know how long the warp was, but I didn’t want to just cut it off. In fact, I didn’t want to lose all those cotton strips she had cut either. So I felt incredible time pressure to weave it off. And it was enjoyable, especially after I learned the interesting quirks of this little loom. When the levers are up the shafts are at rest. When I depressed the levers the shafts raised. It’s the opposite of any table loom I’ve ever used, and it took me some time to get used to that. In the long run the warp was enough for 3 runners, each about 20″ long by 10″ wide.

I gave away two of the runners, one to the woman who passed the loom to me, and the other to a friend whom I learned had helped Sue dress the loom and cut all the fabric strips. Sometimes things work out just as they should. I have my small runner aboard Pandora now. And how serendipitous it is that the color of the weft cotton strips goes quite well with our onboard decor. I couldn’t be more pleased.

Then, lo and behold, I had the intense desire to weave another sakiori design with my own fabric. Now it was truly approaching time to gather our family for Christmas and get packed to depart. I found some wonderful Christmas-y fabric at a fabric thrift shop while traveling with a friend to see an exhibition in Vermont (Salley Mavor). I wasn’t sure it would be enough, and fate led me to find it on Etsy. Also, it was a stroke of luck that my husband offered to cut the strips! Three yards of 1/2″ strips was no easy feat.

I loved every minute of the weaving. It flew by like skating on smooth ice.

It also worked well with a few of my Christmas runners. Win! Win!

We had a simple Christmas with our younger son and a local family and some of their adult children. Holidays have certainly morphed in new directions since our kids have grown and grandchildren have joined the family, sadly not nearby. It was suddenly time to take down our few Christmas decorations and get packed for the flight to Antigua where Pandora was waiting. That deadline threw me into thinking about what I’d accomplished in three months of weaving, and a temptation to look at the things I didn’t accomplish.

That’s when I thought of Janus and the new year. He is the Roman god of beginnings, hence his placement as the first month of the year. He is depicted as two-headed, each of his two faces looking the opposite direction. This is my Achilles heel (sorry for analogy, but it fits so well). I want to take stock and see my accomplishments measure up to my aspirations. But since they never do….what weaver ever finishes all the projects she plans?….it’s not necessarily healthy to go down this path.

My younger son uses an app called “Notion” in his start up business. I am now trying to learn it because I think it will change my attitude about taking stock. It’s an app for tracking projects and goals, mostly for businesses, but I think it could help me realize that I get a great deal done every year. I’m struggling with the app a bit, but in the long run I think it’s going to be a positive thing– a wonderful way of keeping track of all my aspirations, my progresses, and my accomplishments. Every year there are projects I lose track of, and can’t find, in my over-stuffed work space. This app will remind me of things I started and eventually forgot. If I can just learn the nuances of this application I think I will be thankful to use it. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, it’s the new year, I am now onboard living a very different kind of lifestyle, with scenes like these…

This is the giant mango tree in English Harbour, where people usually meet because it’s such an iconic place to gather.

I have started two knitting projects. The first is a shawl, which typical of me, has already been set aside due to more tempting projects! The yarn is what makes this project a zinger. It is handpainted with long runs of the background color and short spurts of the contrasting colors. The pattern calls for knitting the background color in stockinette, then when you see the contrasting colors approaching the needles, you make a little motif by putting five yarn overs on the next three stitches. On the next row you let the yarn overs drop and take the working yarn to wrap those long stitches, creating a little ‘star’ or ‘butterfly.’ I decided to make an asymmetrical shawl shape with a small Shetland lace border called “iron brand” on one side to continue the asymmetrical effect. I was thoroughly enjoying it until bigger thing stole my attention!

The project that took me away from this shawl was an advent calendar of yarn from Kate Davies Designs in Scotland. She has a yarn called “Milarrochy” that is a single ply, 70% wool, 30% mohair blend. I have used it to make her “Con Alma” vest a couple of years ago. The mohair blooms nicely when wet finished. Well, imagine my excitement when she announced that she’d made up boxes that held 24 small balls of “Milarocchy” for an advent calendar! I could not resist. So fun. The box arrived in early November, and it was hard to wait until December 1, but I did it. Here is a photo of the most exciting day for me. On the last day, the little bundle also held a card with a link to an e-book full of patterns for using this yarn.

Drumroll! I love that last color, a perfect Christmas red.

After a good deal of thought, and a fair amount of arranging the yarns into colorways I might knit, I decided to make a vest using Vivian Hoxbro’s ideas for shadow knitting. I am enjoying the process.

I was quite challenged at first because the only needle I had in the appropriate size was only 24″ long. My idea was to knit sideways, a left side front and back, then a right side front and back which would give me vertical stripes with shadows. That’s why I have the yarns gathered in two sections. The right and left sides of the vest will not match. What a struggle to knit that long run of stitches on a 24″ needle!

I was thrilled to discover not just one but two (!) #3 US circular needles that are 40″ long that I’d already stashed on Pandora earlier in the fall. The knitting is so much easier now. Can you see the shadow effect moving diagonally across the knitting? I am almost done with first left side front/back and am looking forward to starting the 2nd colorway for the right side of the vest.

So, here we all are at the open gate of the new year. Let’s all concentrate on looking forward, shall we? Not only about ourselves and our work, but also everything, from family, to community, to global issues. Let’s make this a banner year in as many ways as possible. That’s my wish for all of us.

Can I Please Stop the Clock?

December 6, 2023 | 1 Comment

Today is December 6, and my last post was written on October 5, which is far too long to be out of touch on a blog. A lot of good work, good ideas, and great camaraderie with my fellow weavers have taken place over the past two months, along with feeling that I cannot dance fast enough to accomplish the things that are my highest priority. Are you feeling this way too?

Two months ago I was at a friend’s house with other weavers to spend the day in her beautiful setting mixing and using natural dyes. It was the perfect October day, with the autumn color just beginning to light up the landscape. On the way home I had to stop the car to take a photo of sunlight coming through newly turned golden leaves.

I only brought tiny, 30 yard skeins of 30/2 cotton to dye for use in bobbin lace.

I used indigo and onion skins to make the greens. There is an interesting brown that I now don’t remember. Maybe a mushroom dye? I know it was not black walnut. The red violets are cochineal.

My friend Cindy’s bucolic setting always makes me feel like I’ve entered a fairy tale. She has a huge vegetable garden, and as you can see in the background, a large supply of wood to heat her house. Off in the distance, just to the left of center, is a chicken coop, which supplies her with eggs for a good part of the year. I’m sure it’s hard work to live so simply. I enjoy being in her environment.

I finished the linen bread bags I’ve shown in previous posts, and made a braided cord for one of them. I have a partially made cord for the next bag–each braid will be different. I am happy with the bags. It was an easy project that almost seemed to weave itself.

Since I finished these bags before the linen class was half through, I put on a new warp for napkins based on a design by Lisa Hill that she calls “Metaweave.” They are Brassard 16/2 cottolin set at 24 epi, and the pattern weft is 8/2 cottolin, also from Brassard.

I prefer the underside of this pattern to the front.

I put on enough warp to make 6 napkins, plus sampling. The sampling turned out well on the first try, so I expect I will get a 7th napkin. There will be two each: blue, red, green, and one yellow. The weaving is easy and so enjoyable!

I am ready to start napkin #5, which is the first green. The green I’m using is a great color–sort of kiwi meets avocado. Maybe I can get started on that napkin today.

At last month’s local guild meeting (Area 4, CT state guild) one of our members showed a rag woven holiday table runner that made me want to go straight home and put it on a loom. The problem is that I now only have two looms for weaving fabric and both have projects on them. That led to another member offering me a small 8S table loom–not to borrow, to have! It’s quite a little gem that may need its own post to fully describe and admire. When I picked up the loom I found it already had a warp on it for a small rag woven project. Wasn’t that serendipitous? I wove off that warp with fabric strips that were included, and that gave me a good sense of how the loom works. I now have three small runners, one to use on Pandora and two to give as gifts.

Here is the fabric and yarn I plan to use for the holiday runner. Time is so short now that I doubt I will be able to warp this until I return in the spring. I have high hopes for the fabric strips looking somewhat like the sakiori weaving I did in Japan–little dots of color on a cream/beige background.

The off white yarn is 8/2 unmercerized cotton; the darker spool is a cotton tape. I will either use the 8/2 as warp and the tape yarn as weft, or I’ll blend the two in the warp and use the 8/2 for tabby weft. I have to figure out how to estimate the yardage for the fabric strips, and I’m hoping the runners I made on the previous warp will help me do that. I’ll cut the strips 1/2″ wide, as the strips were that came with the loom. I can then use the woven sett of the rags to determine the sett I’ll weave for this project, adjusted for the width of my project. The fabric was an interesting find. I found about 1/2 yard of it at a fabric remnant shop called Swanson in Turner Falls, Massachusetts. It looks like they will soon have online shopping. I knew I needed more fabric so I googled “Winter Berries” by Susan Winget and found more fabric on Etsy. It’s a win! Now if only I had time to weave it!

This evening I will present a program about Archie Brennan to the Michigan League of Handweavers. I love talking about Archie, and I hope my presentation will spark some weavers to try their hand at tapestry. I’ll be giving a tapestry workshop in Michigan next spring for their annual conference in June. It will be my first time to teach outside New England and the tri-state area–a big deal for me!

As we all get swept full force into the holiday season I hope every one of us can make time to weave, time to reflect on what brings us fulfillment and what projects will best do that, and time to share with others without having our hair on fire. It’s a tall order. Good luck. I’m heading downstairs to start that first green napkin.