tapestry – Page 6

Into the Final Month

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!

Hardly Spring

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.

Creative Outlets

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!

A Month Aboard

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!

Warm and humid

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!