Make and Mend

 For the first time in two months, or so, none of us is sick. And the weather is gorgeous. So to celebrate we’re doing boat chores…

Sure we have plenty of big things to do: we still want to replace one rudder (one was replaced in French Polynesia); the new (Fiji) dagger board requires some finishing work; and we have a few wooden beam covers we want to replace in fibreglass. But this week’s chores were more about making our home, homey.

new pillow covers and wetlocker curtains with the lovely fabric Meri (Hotspur) gave me

 Back in the old British navy era make and mend days gave the sailors a chance to pull out their sewing kits and keep their uniforms from turning to rags. If you live on a boat full time—where your one living space is dining room table, family room, living room, workshop and home office—make and mend days fill the same role. It’s the day (week) where we replace cushion zippers, sew new pillow covers, hang up masks that have been hanging around since Fiji and find a way to mount (again) a Milagro that doesn’t involve screws.

Cruising boats are an interesting mix of adventure craft and home. For us (me) it’s a constant balance between wanting the things that make my home feel like a home and keeping it sparse and light enough that we can sail in rough weather and not have knick knacks turn to projectiles.

Our solution is to limit our collecting to things we can use (our super cool Tahitian Ukes for example), or to fabric that we can sew into cushions (turning the previous ones to rags), or to occasionally add to the mask collection we started 25 years ago.

We also discovered foam-backed photos a while ago. Light weight and easy to hang with double sided sticky tape we’ve chosen a few favourites from our trip to date to hang on the galley bulkhead.

TV antenna--for our first television in viewing in years. Some assembly required... Okay--it's not pretty--but we wanted to watch the Olympics.

 

 Soon enough we’ll get back to real chores (I need to tell Evan that the head pump seems to be leaking, and his list for while Maia and I are in North America is growing lengthy…) but for now there’s something kind of fun about simply making things look nice. Especially because boat chores usually have the opposite effect.