Sewing projects
29 August 2013 | Corvallis
Linda

Eric calls every evening to fill me in on ‘boat progress’. The report today was that everything belonging to the previous owner has been moved off the boat. Together we will decide what to keep and what to let go of. Tomorrow he is planning to clean the bilge (which makes my day at the office seem pretty tame).
I have been doing some sewing projects for the boat. I have made 4 pillows with some super fun tapestry fabric. I saw it a year ago in Portland and took swatches. Of course it was long gone when I went back to the fabric store hoping to buy a few yards. But with the swatches and lots of patience, I was able to find the name of the pattern on the internet and even better, able to find an fabric store that still carried the fabric. I bought 3 yards. The fabric has lots of colors and so it will be easy (at least I hope it will) to choose cushion fabric when the time comes.
My sewing project for the upcoming weekend is to make mesh bags in 4 different colors. (The Rain Shed is the absolute best fabric store for outdoor/practical fabric and hardware that you could wish to find…and it is here in Corvallis/Albany: http://www.therainshed.com
Boats are not houses. Galleys are not kitchens. There are similarities, but there are also differences.
There is a storage area in my galley that is accessible from above (you open a door in the countertop and reach down and down and down). The first level of down is where I intend to keep my pots and pans (which by the way should arrive tomorrow, from my friends at Amazon). Below that space is another space that is so far down that I can’t reach it even when I stand on tippy toe or even when I hoist myself up on the edge of the counter top and reach in and in and in.
Storage space is dear on a sailboat, so I don’t want to give this up, but I do need to be able to reach it. Somehow.
The solution (brilliant, in case you are wondering what kind of solution it is), is to make 4 mesh bags of different colors. Each bag will have a long drawstring which both cinches the bag closed and is led up to a reachable part of the storage area. I hope to be able to store pastas, rice, beans and perhaps flours in sturdy ziplock-style plastic bags which will be placed in the mesh bags, cinched closed and then easy to access by simply grabbing the correctly colored cording to haul the bag up from the depths. This is a deep storage area. Once every couple of weeks I will haul up the bags and replenish my more accessible stores of beans, rice, pasta, etc from these less handy but spacious storage areas.