Stalking Heads

What can I say? I had a headache when I made this yesterday.

Getting Down to the River

Floating homes are usually attached with thick chains or cables to a floating boardwalk, a concrete walkway, or a pier. Most floating home communities in Portland have homes attached to a walkway which has large fittings or cutouts that go around pilings driven deeply into the river bed.

When the river rises during rainy season, the walkway floats ever upward while staying attached around the pilings. The houses and boats moored to the walkway float up as well. The entire lot of homes, walkways, pilings, docks, etc. is referred to as a moorage.

You get down to the river by walking down a ramp that is steeply inclined when the water level is low and that is not so steep during the rainy season.


This photo was taken recently. Since we are near the end of summer the river is low. Notice how steep the ramp is. Also, check out the base of the brick red steel pilings. Notice the difference in coloration at the base. This shows you how high the river gets during the rainy season.

Cars of course always remain on shore. Some moorages have garages and some have funky gravel parking lots. There will be mail boxes on land as well. And a dumpster for garbage.

As a houseboat owner, you'll want a good wheelbarrow or cart to port your groceries down to your house. Oh--and a good rain coat and rain hat for the winter became you cannot manage an umbrella and a wheelbarrow at the same time.

All groceries and purchases (including that 3-piece leather sectional you had to buy) get carried down and garbage gets carried up.

It take a hearty sort of person to live the lifestyle of the river, but what a glorious life it is!

A Boardwalk Photo by Phillie Casablanca

Happiness from Happiknits

Look what arrived in the mail over the weekend:



I won this lovely cowl in a giveaway held by Happiknits. It arrived in the most splendid packaging. Such wonderful thought and attention to detail are evident in both the packaging and the product.

The cowl has trim knit out of a lovely handspun art yarn. There are so many great colors and textures here. It is glorious! Take a look at this close-up:




The office at my day job is FREEZING cold with gusty air-conditioning so I will be wearing it in the office for sure.

I made the mistake of leaving my new treasure lying on the worktable in the studio. In my absence, my model and chief confidant developed ideas of her own:




That Valerie is such a goof! (She is not getting this cowl!)

House Afloat

When your home floats on water, it has to be tethered to something so that it doesn't just drift away. It has to be floating far enough off shore so that the underpinnings don't snag up on the river or lake bottom.

Most floating homes are in communities of like-minded water enthusiasts who often refer to themselves as river rats. I know this because I once was one.

In the Pacific Northwest, a floating home is often colloquially called a houseboat, and its tenants, houseboaters. Although some purists would call the type of homes above floating homes and would reserve the term houseboat for a motorized pontoon boat similar to this:

Houseboat photo by riffraff67

How are the houses in the first photo kept from drifting downriver? What are they attached to? How do you get down to the river? Where do you park your car? These are some questions that will be answered in the next installment of this "Floating Home Friday" series.

Beginning the Bouclé Beanie

In the last post you saw the sketch of my idea for a beanie with a bouclé brim, and you read about my confessed insanity of creating the crocheted bouclé yarn by hand.

Here's the hat progress so far. This is the crown of the hat before felting, modeled by the lovely Valerie:


After vigorous felting and much dye loss out of this commercial yarn by Malabrigo, the crown looked like this as it dried on the hat block:


After it the crown had dried (and stained the heck out of my lovely hat block) it looked like this on Valerie:


Now I need to do some swatching to decide if I want to crochet or knit the brim and in which stitch pattern.

Making Crocheted Bouclé

Higglety pigglety, this bouclé is bigglety!


The 33 yards of bulky and dense bouclé, shown in the last post, was made of the ingredients that you see in this photo. The curly part is made of 100 yards of a 2-ply handspun wool yarn that I made in the colorway like the yarn on the left, except it was drafted as a thinner yarn than the one in the photo. The binder yarn is a thin wool machine yarn put up on a cone. Some beads were added to the binder yarn just for fun.

Each loop (there are approximately 3½ loops per inch) was stitched in place by my own nimble fingers using a small steel crochet hook and basic crochet stitches.


If you do the math, you'll calculate that there are approximately 4,158 loops handstitched into this fine specimen that took 8-9 hours to create (including the spinning and plying of the original fiber, but not including the time it took to do the process discussed in the following paragraph).

Before the 2-ply yarn was put into a bouclé, it was knitted up as a hat that didn't come up to my standards. That yarn sat all done up as a hat for a month or so before I frogged it. (For those of you who are not knitters, frog is a term for unravelling or ripping apart a knitted item. The term is precise--ha ha!--because a frog says "Rip-it, rip-it!")

Here's a photo of hat undone:


Now, the rational thing to do at this point would have been to put this fiber back in a warm water bath, straightening it when wringing out the excess water, and then drying it with a weight attached to straighten it further. It could then be re-knit into something new.

Why do the rational thing when the crazy thing is so much fun? I saw all the lovely waves in that unravelled yarn and immediately thought, "Hells bells, I could crochet up some bouclé with that stuff!"

Had anyone ever crocheted bouclé before? Was it totally insane? How long would it take?

You can see that I was already obsessed and running down the path to massive time consumption for a hair-brained idea. But, this is what I saw in my head--a better hat with a bouclé brim having the texture of a Berber carpet.


So I sat down and started crocheting the binder yarn around the curly handspun 2-ply.


If you want to try this, go take an old sweater, unravel it, loosely put it on your swift and leave it there while you crochet it into some cool new stuff. Here's what you do: *Work a single crochet (sc) in the top of a little wave, work a chain stitch (ch); repeat from * for each and every little f*ing wave in your yarn. (Have fun with that! Good time to listen to some knitting podcasts or a book on tape.)


Next post I'll show you Bigglety Beanie in process.

Loopy for Bouclé

Bouclé is a french word for curly. With your forbearance in the next few posts, I will take the liberty of using this word as an adjective, a verb, and a noun.

In this manufactured green bouclé yarn sample, you can see evenly-spaced, tidy curls that are plied into the yarn. This yarn is fairly thin and the loops are small. A knitted fabric from it would drape nicely and would also have a uniform curly texture with a short nap.




In this red knitted hat brim, the loops of the bouclé yarn are of a thick and fluffy, loosely-spun roving that was plied around a worsted weight yarn. The result is a soft uneven texture with a fairly tall nap.



In handspinning, a bouclé yarn can be created by loosely plying one strand of fiber around another so that the loose strand forms little circles of fiber that stand out from the other strand which becomes a sort of core yarn. This may not be a good description because I'm no expert (having only tried a bouclé yarn once in a spin class.)

For the same reason (no expertise) I make another disclaimer. Perhaps what I created and am showing you next is not really yarn because the loops are not plied.




Is it yarn? If it wasn't made by plying, how was it created? How big is it? What's it for? You'll find answers to these and other questions in the next post.

Floating Home Fridays

Moon Over the Willamette River by Tokiko Anderson

Is floating in the title a verb and home the direction?

One could imagine floating home after a a summer's eve ball where all the ladies wore white gowns and the gentlemen wore tails. The magic of dancing under moonlight and the remembrance of the eclectic music could cause an ethereal feeling while you meander home in a blissful state. I know this is true because is has happened to me.

More literally, if you had a little house along water, you could imagine floating home in a wee boat with your hand dangling in the cool water. Or if you knew how to pilot a hot-air balloon, you could surely float home in that.

What if, though, it is the house that floats, and floating is an adjective? This is the topic of a little series that I intend to pursue, on a regular or irregular basis on Fridays and which I hinted at way back when. It has nothing to do with my creative life--or does it?

*****

Image Information: This is a print that I bought from Tokiko on the Last Thursday Artwalk in the Alberta Arts District of Portland. Tokiko's work really speaks to me. See more of her work by clicking on Tokiko's name in the image credit above.

100 Posts!

Yeah! That last post was number 100! At the beginning of the blog, I wouldn't have dreamed to get this far. I thought there was too little to say but now there is so much.

Inner Princess

A favorite Midwest artist and storyteller is Brian Andreas. I first encountered his work one summer at a gallery in Galena, Illinois. Brian is the genius behind Story People. His illustrations and accompanying writing is pithy humor at its greatest. Each illustration has a story told in one or two sentences.

I was viewing/reading a stack of illustrations in the gallery and was laughing so uproariously that I attracted two saleswomen at once who came flying like crows to a feast. They both chattered on with more than characteristic zeal about this artist's work.

The story that most resonated with me in the most tersely cogent way ('though you'd have to see the illustration to get the best humor of it) was this:

"Are you a princess? I said. And she said I'm much more than a princess but you don't have a name for it yet here on earth."

In the fall of the same year, I featured handmade handbags at a juried art show and the theme for the year was "Inner Princess." Each artist was to make an item for the theme, which was so perfect for me as a fiber girly girl. This is the OOAK purse that I made and sold.




You might see this inner princess influence surface in my work now and again.