It was such a wonderful experience to arrive in Great Harbor Cay to soft warm breezes and brilliant sunshine. We had a couple of days of magnificent sunrises and sunsets—just what I needed. Since then it’s been gale force winds and ominous skies. Offshore the winds have been very high indeed, around 70 mph. Numerous friends have written to tell me about the cruise ship that got stuck in these winds and had to confine all passengers to their cabins while the ship returned to the US.

So, after getting somewhat used to this violent weather and calming down that Pandora was not going to rip herself right off the dock, I have picked up some projects again. I am about three rings and chains from finishing my little tatted lace trim. Maybe tonight I’ll be able to sew it to my t-shirt. Fingers crossed on that.

Yesterday, I took my copper pipe loom ashore to warp it (far too bouncy onboard for such a task). Bob rigged up a brilliantly technical, Rube Goldberg arrangement for clamping the edge of my loom to a picnic table. It involved two clamps, a length of webbing with a small clasp at one end such as is used for tying things to the roof of a car, and then a length of plain webbing and length of line (nauticalese for rope).

Can you see that Bob attached one clamp to the picnic table and then used the 2nd clamp to attach the corner of the loom to the first clamp.  So clever…. To minimize the torquing of the loom he has the car webbing running from the long bar of the 1st clamp to the other end of the picnic table.  The 2nd webbing is bracing the bottom corner of the loom to the picnic table.It was quite an engineering feat, and in the end, I was able to warp the loom all by myself while Bob walked to the market on the island. With my spool of seine twine in a bucket and tensioned by going over the brace of a picnic table nearby, I was able to use one hand to keep the tension on the warp while making wraps of warp with the other hand. I was done in less than hour!

All finished warping.  Then I sat down for a bit to space the warp threads evenly and weave a header that will support the beginning of the woven tapestry.  Does it look cold?  It certainly was!  The wind was blowing about 30 mph and the resultant wind chill was very un-tropical!

Here is the cartoon I’ll be using for this project. It’s the final line from one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, and it happens to be a favorite with our younger son as well. This tapestry is for him. In this photo I am measuring for possible border sizes.

Meanwhile, in my inbox yesterday I found a message from a friend alerting me to a post on Weavetech that she knew I’d be interested in reading. Now that internet is not a ‘given’ for us I have dropped the daily digest format, so I would never have seen this post without the ‘heads up!’ from my friend.

It turns out there is a new book out by Oxford Press about two subjects very dear to me: ancient Greece and weaving. Being a Greek student in college is what led me to weaving in the first place– 40 years ago. It was the connection between text and textile that brought me to weaving, and now 4 decades later a few people are looking at the connections between the words for various parts of early Greek ships and words used in weaving terminology. And now that I spend such a great deal of time living onboard my own little vessel (though not a ship) I am naturally curious to learn more about these findings.

The book is originally in German, and published by an English publisher (Oxbow) with a division in the US.  You can find it online here.  Surely it must also be available in English, especially since the title is translated –I am certainly counting being able to order an English translation.

Weben und Bewebe in der Antike: Materialitat–Reprasentation–Episteme–Metapoetick
(Texts and Textiles in the Ancient World: Materiality–Representation–Episteme–Metapoetics)
Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer (Author)

What I got to read, through the post on WeaveTech, is an article taken from the book, written by Marie-Louise Nosch and published on a website called www.academia.edu

Though I could not find the article by searching that site (maybe you will have better luck), the woman who posted on WeaveTech sent me a pdf. I’d like to post it here, but will first find out if I need permission for that. Stay tuned. It is a compelling study of the words for various parts of a sailing and rowing ship being the same as words used in both spinning and weaving. Since textile production is an older technology, it is presumed that the words used in ship building and  sailing terms were borrowed from textile terms, due to textile’s prominent connection to ships, ship building, and the act of sailing or rowing.

And on a calmer day Bob and I took a walk on the pristine beach at Great Harbor Cay.

Life took a strange and dark turn 2 weeks ago, and I left Florida to fly home.  I went home to be with my oldest friend as she entered a very dark period of her life.  She has lost someone very dear, someone who was dear to me as well.

During the past weeks I have watched my friend navigate very troubled waters with a strength and grace I did not know she has.  You can always learn something new about anyone, no matter how long you’ve known them.  She has become an inspiration for me.  Life throws unspeakable challenges at us, but I’ve learned a lot from my friend’s deep, still waters.

Along the way I’ve finished reading The Paper Garden, a biography of the 18th c. female artist, Mary Delany.  The author, Molly Peacock, was known more for her poetry than her prose, until she wrote this book.  The book is so popular now that the British Museum has had to limit access to Mary Delany’s paper collages in order to preserve them from the sudden rise in people requesting to see them.

My friend has been an artist since before I met her.  Growing up together, she painted and drew while I wrote things and dabbled in handwork.  Later she began sculpting and got her fine arts degree in that medium.  This quote from The Paper Garden makes me wonder where my friend’s artwork will go next:

Black pigment is made from charred organic matter—and that includes burnt bones. This chilling fact contributes to the black background of Mrs. D’s Rosa Gallica… Not that burnt bones necessarily produced the pigment that Mrs. D. used to create the black backgrounds of her flowers—her pigment could have been made from tar, pitch, lampblack, pine soot, anything charred to get a noir so deep it looks as if it came from the mouth of Hades. But whatever the composition of the dry crystals she ground with a mortar and pestle, then mixed with liquid and adhesive, its source is something burnt. Carbon. Organic. Ashes. Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don’t think it is. But art is a poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.

So, for me, regular life begins to lurch along once again.  I am back in the Bahamas with Bob, in a beautiful spot that we have not visited before called Great Harbor Cay.  When we left the harbor for a short sail yesterday, three dolphins found us and played in our bow wave.

The sunsets have been stunning, the Bahamians are the friendliest people I have ever met, the cruisers have been pretty friendly too, and Bob is letting me rest.  The days are warm and slow.

My biggest wish is that my friend could switch places with me.  I would take a couple weeks of her grieving and the growing responsibilities she has taken on to care for others in her family, while she could spend some time here– healing.  Life is so thoroughly unfair….