Earrings

The old sailor song goes "Worm and parcel with the lay, then turn and serve the other way."
I'm making earrings for the sail in the old way.
I left enough slack at the corners to make up these reinforced loops to fasten to. In the old days they were called earrings. Throat, Peek, Clew and Tack.

This here is a cuntline.

This cuntline has a worming.

Neatly wormed and ready for parcelling.

 First you worm the cuntlines, the actual name for the grooves between the strands of a rope. The worm is a strand of small stuff laid in the crack to give more surface for the outer windings to bear on, making the whole finished product quite stiff, weatherproof and chafe resistant.

Nice clean new white canvas!

 Then you take a strip of canvas and wrap the wormed rope in a solid winding and tie it up like a parcel with a string and some half hitches. In the old days both the rope and the parcelling would be soaked in Pine Tar and linseed oil but that's stinky and smeary and very soon I would have tar on everything which wouldn't matter on a sailing ship at sea. Not in my apartment, thank you.

Tied down with a bit of sailmaker's twine. Like a burial shroud in those cultures that don't believe in coffins.

Then once the thing is wormed and parcelled you wrap 'er up tight as you can with waxed marling cord, tight as the dickens, keeping the turns of wrapping evenly jammed right next to each other.It took me a minute of sleepy confusion to figure out which way to wind the serving. There are four options. Think about it. Tell me if it doesn't make you a little bit dizzy to visualise all four.And I think I still got it wrong. Oh well. I don't think it really matters that much.

I made a little bobbin out of a bamboo stir-stick from Powell Paint.

Oregon Leather sells many types of waxed twines including the traditional waxed linnen, which this is not. I used dacron sailtwine for the sewing, and I like this nylon because it stretches a bit and you can get more compression with it.

I was surprised by how much the twine compresses the rope, and that makes it very nearly rigid. Quite transformative. I will eventually marl the whole corner especially including the earring, to the sail. 14 cuntlines each way.

 But the stuff does an interesting thing to the loop of soft hemp rope.Stiffens it up nicely. Keeps the loop open. In the later days of sail the earrings were made of wrought iron lashed with marling onto the boltrope. Too modern for me.
Then what I did on the one loop, the Peek Earring, is to hitch over the service with green tuna cord keckling, a form of ring-bolt hitching that spreads nicely around the loop in a sacrificial chafe-proofing that can be easily renewed as it wears. Re-serving would be a tedious task I would just as soon undertake as seldom as possible.

Keckling, or hackling or hogsbacking as it was sometimes called

The Clew is the lower outer corner that the sheet ties on with which you control the sail.
The Tack is the other lower corner tied down at the mast to spread the sail.
The Throat is the upper inner corner where the halyard fastens on to raise the sail and keep her raised.
The Peek is the outer upper corner held out by the sprit, that other skinny pole that runs diagonally across a spritsail.