Northwest Gothic

Once the wallpaper was off, we were left to ponder the state of what was underneath.

Like living in a Faulkner novel.

Water-stained plaster-and-lathe walls, in kinda rough shape.

To be fair, we didn't have to strip wallpaper from this wall. It came that way!

Only one wall appeared to be held up by the wallpaper,though. This wall, between the living room and the kitchen, was in the worst shape. Nothing is more frighteningly exhilarating than taking this:

to this, in the house you just bought.

It's only a wallpaper moon

Goal #1: Paint. Paint the dining room, living room, master bathroom, bedroom, office, landing, stairs and guest room.

Before we move in.

We knew the walls had been wallpapered at some point -- the seams were clearly visible in nearly all the rooms.  We agreed that looked terrible, and if we were going to do this thing, we were going to do it right.  And doing it right meant removing wallpaper.  We'd heard horror stories, but we girded our loins and prepared for battle.

I found a bubble in the dining room wall and made a start.  The paint, and top layer of wallpaper, never to be seen by human eyes again, came off easily, leaving several layers of wallpaper below.

I loved the archeology of the task, and, to be honest, the picking off of long strips of paint and wallpaper.  Bit by bit, we unearthed our vintage dining room wallpaper.

I know it's crazy, but I kind of love it.

The seasonal snowflake wallpaper, however, seems like a questionable choice.

Was it like this when we bought it?

So it's not like we didn't notice the imperfections. That upstairs window really needed some love. The ceiling in the living room had some imperfections. We'd want to repaint. The bones -- and muscles, and joints, and tendons -- were great. A new haircut, some make-up, maybe a good night's sleep was all this body needed to be looking her best.

Then we got the keys, and got inside. We started to notice more of her imperfections up close.

 

How many layers of wallpaper could there possibly be?

Maybe a facelift and some Botox would help.

I'm not a contractor...

...but I'm pretty sure a cardboard beer box and 3 inches of spackle isn't the correct way to patch a hole.

This new old house.

Hello, family and friends! Welcome to our new house.

We've made a bit of a mess of the place already, so I thought I'd start you off with the MLS photos so you could get a sense of how we first saw it.  See if you can count all of the area rugs!

You enter into the living room:

Which leads to the dining room:

Which leads to the recently redone kitchen:

It has three bedrooms -- two upstairs, one downstairs (the brown room). Collin will use the yellow room for his office:

And a funny little landing at the top of the stairs. I think this is going to be my favorite room once it's full of books, plants, and a basket of yarn.

There are two full bathrooms. The upstairs is entertainingly quirky. It's a recent addition -- you can see it in the front of the house, upstairs. It's about 18-20' long, and yes, that whole far end of the room is a side-by-side, completely open bath and shower.

There's a sunny, south-facing back deck. You know, for when it's sunny in Portland:

And a blank slate of a backyard:

 

It has its charms and quirks, and we discover more every day. Smartly-arranged kitchen organizers? Check. Friendly neighbors? Check. Rooms without electrical outlets? Check. Bathroom lights that turn on by themselves? Check.

Neighborhood feral cats? We've counted eight so far.

Welcome wagon or harbingers of certain doom? You decide.

A change of scenery...

...now that it's been over a year. Here's a view of early fall in the Columbia River Gorge while I (continue to) consider the future of this blog.

You sure do make it like a sunny day.

A bit of a photo-essay, since clearly it's the writing of the blog that's holding me back, and not my utter laziness when it comes to blogging.

I bought some Lincoln Merino at the LYS (a pound for $13!) so that I'd have something to play with, something not too precious that I'd be worrying about messing up (although I still was).


Round one:

And two:


And then -- then I was ready for something pretty. My wonderful LYS, Fiber Nooks and Crannys (sic) (why is it not Crannies? I clearly have some problems since I cannot get past this), stocks Dicentra Designs fiber on consignment, and I fell in love with the Dune colorway.

5 ounces of blue-faced Leicester top in saturated, rich blues and orangey-gold. Here's my overspun single:

And here it is plied and skeined:


I've named it Helianthus, after the sunflower genus -- it reminds me of driving through Kansas. I think it'll be just the thing for a sunny winter scarf to lighten the northwest winter mood. It ended up being around 375 feet and 3 7/8 ounces.

A new member of the family.

She doesn't have a name yet, but she's definitely a she. She was a super-score on Craigslist a few months ago -- a nearly unused Ashford Traditional single drive. All that was missing were two bobbins, and the instruction manual.

It started, well, this past summer. I'd been smitten with spinning for awhile, and finally felt free enough to take it up once grad school was over. I visited The Yarn Tree in Brooklyn while I was home -- a lovely shop, and I got to meet Linda LaBelle, the owner and author of The Yarn Lover's Guide to Hand Dyeing. She was very sweet and very helpful. Along with some sale Koigu, I picked up 2 oz. of butter-soft, pure white Targhee top, and my Schacht spindle.


Get it? Clouds? Targhee? Do I really need to push this comparison? A few months later (that move got in the way), I had this:


Once I settled in Corvallis, I signed up for a two-day spinning class at the Oregon State Craft Center, one of my favorite things I've discovered in my new town. While the class was... not perfect, I did get to get some time on a wheel, and I learned to prepare a fleece.

Here's my first handspun on a wheel:

This is not cloud-like. It is dense, scratchy stuff. It was difficult to spin, lots of stops and starts as I learned what the wheel and the wool needed. But the last 10 yards just flew, and I was hooked. That 2 ounces (I think) took me hours. This ounce, bought from Steam Valley Fibers at the Tioga County Fair, took me about 15 minutes:


And I was hooked.

More to come, hopefully in less than a month, on how my wheel and I have been getting along...

Rites of passage.

Why in the world would 400+ knitters, of all shapes, sizes, genders, and ages gather in once place? Was it Earth Day, or The World Forestry Center that brought us all together, desperate as we were to learn about the most effective stand density for Doug fir in year 25 of a 50-year rotation?

And there's a forestry reference on my knitting blog. I am so cool you could keep a side of meat in me for a week. (Now I've added science fiction humor quotes. Time to move along.)


It was, of course, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, better known as The Yarn Harlot.


She was truly wonderful, funny and fresh (as you can read in her post on the day). I will admit to fearing that the talk would be sort of a rehash of her blog, or tired knitting humor. It really wasn't. Her commitment to a bit (drunken yarn company executives, anyone?) was unparalleled. I also enjoyed how she honestly seemed taken aback by the size of the crowd -- since I felt the same way. As a knitter, and one who knits in public and attends my very own weekly knitting circle, I have difficult time describing why it was so odd to see, literally, hundreds of people sitting in one place and knitting. Why should that seems so extraordinary? The topic of the talk spoke to this a bit -- knitters are all different, and few other hobbies/activities/arts are so easily portable. Waiting for a plane, for an appointment, people are usually either reading or watching TV. Knitters stick out, and no one really knows what to make of us. Putting us all in one room sort of turns all that on its head.

One thing that does unite us -- we like to show off our work. I wore a mohair/alpaca/merino blend in an absolute oven of a room until I almost passed out. But my sweater looked good.

It was quite fun. Aside from the Yarn Harlot, my new knitting buddies BlueKnit and MonkeyCat (her excellent pics are here) were along, adding to the sense of knitting community -- and troublemaking. The three of us, in search of food, after claiming our seats, took a shortcut back to the car. We rounded a corner, only to bust into SPM being interviewed. On camera. And she definitely noticed, as we ran away (literally!) giggling like high schoolers. Oops.

Aside from that mild humiliation, I had a grand time checking off another knitting rite of passage (LYS owner recognizes me? Check. Knitting group? Check. Blog? Check.). On to the fiber festivals and the taking of sock pictures in front of public landmarks!

Most recent podcast: Cast On.
What I'm reading: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.
Currently listening to: Joshua Morrison's Home.

FO: Baltic Knee Socks

Ravelry project link here.

Pattern: Clementine's Baltic Socks [free PDF], by Diana Jones.

Yarn: Less than one skein of Fearless Fibers (blog here) Superwash Merino Wool Sock Yarn in Brick House.

Needles: Size 1 bamboo DPNs.

Size: To fit a size 6.5 foot.

Mods: To make the socks knee-high, I added shaping in the handy stockinette side panels, and made the ribbing at the top longer.

For: Me!

Time: Casted on July 2007; finished February 2008. They kept me company during two moves and a job hunt. We've bonded.

Thoughts: A great pattern. The pattern repeat was easy to memorize, and those stockinette panels made my first time calf-shaping attempt. They're my best-fitting pair of socks yet, although they'll need some elastic woven in to actually stay up. The Fearless Fibers yarn -- which I was lucky enough to have picked up back when it sold for $14.50/550 yards (still a steal at $19) -- was a wonder. It just going on and on and on -- there's still a good chunk of it left. It was also still my first short-row heel. Overall -- I love them!

Most recent podcast: Cast On.
What I'm reading: Mozart's Women, by Jane Glover.

FO: Hemlock Ring Blanket

Ravelry project link here.

Pattern: Jared Flood's blanket-sized version of the Hemlock Ring doily.

Yarn: One and a half skeins of Cascade Ecological Wool in colorway 8010

Needles: Started on US 10 Brittany DPNs, and finished on 32" US 10 Addi Turbo circulars (my LYS was out of the 40", and I really could have used that extra eight inches).

Size: I did two more pattern repeats than Jared's version -- although I didn't measure the final product.

Mods: None.

For: A Christmas gift for my mom.

Time: Casted on at the end of October; casted off on the tarmac at SFO on December 20th.

Thoughts: A gorgeous pattern, and I am exceedingly happy about how it turned out. My mom seemed to love it! Because I finished it on the plane home, I couldn't block it as long as it really needed -- I had about 36 hours to block on my sister's bed before she came home and, you know, needed somewhere to sleep. I had to block it super aggressively -- there was a lot of fighting, and it's still a tiny bit ripply -- but the final product is pretty striking (considering that it looked like this:

More Christmas updates to come -- fiber goodness, new books, and news on life (I'll be moving soon). For now, though -- I'm going to enjoy my Saturday.

Most recent podcast: CraftLit. I'm catching up with Tristan and Isolde.
Currently listening to: Blue Planet.
What I'm reading: The Amber Spyglass, by Phillip Pullman.