Crafting on Big Tancook Island

This weekend, my mum (and her dog) and my sister and I went away for a crafting weekend. There’re two islands off the coast of Chester, NS where people have both permanent and summer residences called Big Tancook and Little Tancook. My best friend’s mum has a cottage-y house on Big Tancook, and that was where we were headed! Tancook has a population of around 200 in summer, and 120 in the winter. To get there, you take an hour-long ferry ride. If you’re an island-dweller, you have to bring all your groceries from the mainland. There are no grocery stores on the island, one cafe, no B&Bs (although there’s a couple house rentals), and if you need gas for your car you have to bring a tank to the mainland and fill it up. If you pre-arrange, you can bring a car on the ferry. You’re also not required to have your car safety-inspected, so the cars on the island tend to be a bit ramshackle. Anything you don’t want to carry on to the ferry, you load in the numbered bins as seen below, and those get lifted by crane onto the ferry.

Lucy, my friend’s mum, is a professional knitter/knit designer and a recreational quilter so she has a sewing machine on the island and a beautiful sewing room! I brought a Sewaholic Granville shirt that I’d had cut out for AGES to work on, although my progress was hampered by the fact that I forgot to interface one of the collar stands ahead of time and didn’t bring any interfacing with me. I did get started on it, and I’m pretty proud of my top-stitching! The machine was really cute and nice to work with, and only did straight stitch. It also didn’t have a foot pedal, and instead Lucy had a batting-wrapped brick to prop her foot on while using the knee lever for power. My home sewing machine has the ability to convert to knee operation, and this has tempted me to try that out more often because my feet usually get cold from being on the floor using the foot pedal in my basement.

 

Nearly all of the houses on the island have an ocean view, and Lucy’s is no exception! The inside of the house is also really colourful and right up my alley! There are pink and peach and lime and turquoise walls, loads of fun prints on the furniture, and tons of artwork and crafts all over the walls. Plus a lava lamp for good measure. Sophie claimed a squishy spot behind my mum’s chair as her sleeping spot, although every time she needed to emerge from her cave there was a lot of hemming and hawing because she’s a big chicken who is frightened of everything (including encroaching ottomans).

 

I did most of my sewing on Friday night, and on Saturday morning we lazed around and I did a lot of knitting. I’d attached a button band onto the cardigan I’m working on completely backwards, so I had to take the entire thing out and pick up the stitches all over again, but I was in a good brainspace Saturday morning to tackle it and got it back on track. My sister Amy brought along embroidery to work on; she has her own embroidery business so she was finishing up a hoop on commission for Cove Kombucha (a local business). Then, she started work on something for me! 2 Christmases ago, she gave me a gift card that said she would embroider on the garment of my choice, and I STILL hadn’t claimed it. I finally decided that I wanted floral embroidery on the yoke of my jean jacket, so we talked colours and flower style and she started it while we were on the island! I’m really excited to see how it all turns out.

After lunch (homemade macaroni & cheese!), we went for a walk around the island. There’s an art gallery/library/photo studio owned by Hillary Dionne (a friend of Lucy’s) that we were aiming for, but it was closed so we just enjoyed our walk instead. Tancook is trying to be a bit more tourist friendly, and as seen below has put out signs at areas that are public so that visitors don’t think it’s someone’s private property. We also had a little photo shoot on our walk! Sophie looks pretty blissed out, but that’s kind of her natural state.

Mum continued for a longer walk, and Amy and I headed back to the house where I did a mini photo session for Amy and then she took a few photos of me. On an episode of the Stitcher’s Brew podcast that I listened to a little while ago about blog photography, one of the guests mentioned that when someone else is taking her photo, she likes to have them pose in the position where she’ll be standing and then take their photo to show them the type of photo she’s looking for. She said it makes the whole process so much easier because it’s the quickest way to communicate to someone what you’re looking for in a photo. I’d told Amy about this at the time and she loved it, so the photo below is one of her examples for me of the type of photo she wanted. I think it turned out quite nice! I feel very summery and breezy (that’s my seersucker Myosotis dress).

Sunday morning we caught the 9am ferry, and there was some beautiful lupins by the wharf! I don’t know how many other areas have lupins, but they run rampant in Nova Scotia in the spring! They’re one of my favourite flowers, although they’re better left in the wild. As a child, my dad gathered a bouquet of lupins for his mum as a special surprise, but when he presented them to my Grammie (who was not one to mince words), she told him they were full of bugs – which they totally are – and threw them in the garbage! I love to admire them on the side of the road though. There’s also the most beautiful picture book that we read as kids that you should all check out if you get a chance. It’s called Miss Rumphius, and she’s known as The Lupin Lady. It has the most gorgeous artwork!

Sophie felt she was an excellent first mate on the ferry ride back, and made sure she supervised closely from a porthole on the top deck. It was really lovely to go away and not have wifi or anything to distract us. We ended up going to bed early and sleeping very soundly both nights, and it was very restful. I really like the idea of a weekend (or even just overnight) trip to work on crafts. I pre-ordered the upcoming book Handmade Getaway through their Kickstarter campaign, and I’m excited to receive my copy in the coming months. It’s co-authored by the owner (Karyn Valino) of the workroom, which was my local sewing haunt when I lived in Toronto, and it’s all about planning sewing getaways – complete with packing lists and menu ideas and lots of projects to try! Have you ever gone on a crafting retreat or weekend trip?