Keep On Keeping On...

Kitty likes sparkly, fluffy crowns. And power tools and trucks. This girl contains multitudes....

There have been a flurry of projects going on around these parts. Maura has been working on increasing her social media presence which is why there is no photo of her. Also, my memory card with the photos of her is el corrupto. In all fairness, Maura has helped us tremendously by helping out a lot with household chores and watching the little one while we work. She has had some successes- YAY! She made dinner and cleaned up! And some failures. If you are babysitting and things get really quiet you need to assume your charge is off making mischief of some sort that will invariably end badly. Life lessons. All important life lessons.

Which brings me to Kitty's project. Kitty took it upon herself to trim her own hair. Remember how I mentioned how much she loved her scissors? Who knew that post contained foreshadowing. No, the photo does not show her hair parting over her ear. It shows where she hacked off a honking big chunk of hair leaving a gap over her ear. She doesn't have a whole lot of hair to begin with and now she has even less. She will be sporting more than her fair share of clips for a while. There is no reason for Mark's hair. It just is what it is.

While we are planning out the placement of our new clutches and winches and figuring out how to improve the run of lines to the cockpit, Mark took the traveler apart for a bit of maintenance on the traveler, the mounting plate and the deck beneath it all. We spent a good bit of time matching paint colors (why oh why did the PO use 3 different shades of white on one boat?) and hopefully once its all tidied up, perfected and painted it will look brand new. I had photos of it all but again with the corrupted card. They weren't terribly exciting photos anyway, so there.

Mark continues to work on the Most Splendid Fuel System Ever. I know that he is methodical in all that he does and I know the man does not possess a single slacker gene but I can't help but think that there has not been a tremendous amount of progress. Actually, there has been it just doesn't actually LOOK like it. He has all the parts he needs. Or so he thought. He originally planned to bend copper tubing using the tools he made to ensure that all the bends were exact and all the straight runs straight. He found out that by bending the copper himself, the foot print of the tubing runs was too large to install on the Star board plate for mounting. We either need to get another boat with a bigger engine room or he will have to order new copper elbows and what nots which have a tighter turning radius. These have to be ordered because of course, no one stocks these. No one. These are not exactly exotic but apparently no one does their own plumbing, except for us. So we are waiting on
the fittings to finish stage 2.

For those of you who geek out over wiring and plumbing diagrams, Here's an isometric for you. If you are planning on redoing your fuel system and you want to out geek your dock neighbors, go to my Flickr account where I've made all 3 of the schematics and isometrics public. Download and blow em up. We just saved you 2 weeks of work. Let your Nerd flag fly my friends, let it fly. Yes, we have similar paperwork for every single system Mark has touched. No, he really can not stop being an engineer for even a minute. Yes, I have learned to embrace his persnickety perfectionism. No, I have not adopted it for my own projects. Be serious.

Speaking of my projects, I got busy on my latest endeavor. There was a huge flock of vultures hanging around which can only mean one thing. I am about to begin a sewing project.

Seriously, flock of vultures and I am not even kidding

I began working on the salon port light curtains in earnest. I desperately want to try to make the boat interior just a wee bit more modern. Ok, I want to drag it kicking and screaming out of the 1980s. Not that I have anything against hunter green other than it induces a desire in me to wear high waisted acid washed jeans and to arrange my bangs to resemble a shrubbery on my forehead, but having the boat feel like a home makes me happy and I am all about being happy. So freshened up and modernized it must be.

This should be easy right? Wrong. Firstly, the fabric I chose to help in the de-80fying of the boat has a lovely geometric pattern. While I love the crispness of the design, I do not love the perfection required in cutting out said fabric. The boat will never heel over enough to cover up my wonky first attempt. In order to a have a peaceful existence, it is important to know yourself. I bought lots of extra fabric.

The second issue which makes things tricky is that our cabin sides slope. This means the readily available boat curtain rods won't work as the curtains would never hang down over the portlights. Also, our opening ports have dogs which protrude too much to allow us to use the commercially available curtain tracks. We need something that will attach at both the top and the bottom, will allow the panels to slide to open and close and with enough stretch to work around the port light dogs. I think I've come up with a solution with shock cord and pad eyes. We shall see how we get on.

 I did have a stroke of genius for the backing fabric. The heavily insulated, bubbly, shiny aluminum stuff you see on most boats is too bulky to allow the curtains to be slid open and closed on the shock cord. I am lining ours with aluminum coated ironing board fabric. Time will tell how well it holds up to mildew but during my initial most definitely NOT scientific explorations it did reflect the radiant heat much more than just a plain fabric liner. I'm sure the bubbly stuff is better at insulating but the ability to open and close the curtains easily outweighs the slight insulating advantage of the bulky stuff.

Fortunately, I have quite a bit of time before Mark will let me install the hardware for the curtains as he works in the boat so I can take my time and do the sewing in fits and spurts as a way to diminish my inevitable cursing of my trusty Singer. I will be sure to post photos of the salon once its all installed- whether it works beautifully or ends in tears.

And soon, very soon I shall begin the completely functionally unnecessary but oh so soul satisfying girlification of our head. Just need to brush up on my air brushing skills first. Ok, so I need to obtain some air brushing skills but that is all part of the plan...

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