Skip to main content

Kim Thomson of Live Wool



You know a picture like this would get my attention.  (Unfortunately it is a photograph of a newspaper article that I was not able to find electronically.  P.S. It is from the Washington State magazine called Getaway.  Discovered it on my way on a ferry to Port Townsend.)  Kim Thomson is the owner and creator of this portable yarn ball hat.  I love that it would certainly allow one to move and knit almost effortlessly.  So with her name and a location of Port Townsend, Washington I decided to find out more about Kim.

Let's start with the city.  Port Townsend is located in the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula and is known for the many Victorian buildings remaining from its late 19th-century heyday.  Captain George Vancouver found and named it in 18th century, so this place has been around for some time.  Here's a couple of geographic maps to help locate Port Townsend, Jefferson County in Washington State.
The red above is Jefferson county and the red dot, Port Townsend 

If you look at photos of the place it appears to be a part of a beautiful, protected harbour of the Admiralty Inlet that flows into Puget Sound.  With a population of just over 9,000 and a listing on the U.S. National Register of Historical Places, this small town has a lot going for it.

During the summer it has what appears to be a vibrant Farmers Market, which is exactly where the top photo was taken of Kim Thomson.  She is a trained artist who spent much of her life working with chemicals as an artist.  Ultimately she became sensitive to them and had to give up that craft.  For several years she was a busker playing her fiddle around the Pacific Northwest.  This activity took her to New Zealand where she found knitting and fell in love with it (my kind of person).  Upon returning to the U.S. she combined her sculpting with her knitting skills and has created lovely felted items.




Paul and I were just talking about spending some time in the Olympic Peninsula and when we get there I will have to add a stop into Kim Thomson's  studio and gallery, Thomson Art Forms, 833 Water Street, Port Townsend.  I need to meet this inventive and creative individual in person.

Comments

  1. Felting is the next thing I want to learn!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ode to the Cat

It has been six months since Mike, the cat's, passing.  I think of him every day and miss him especially when Paul is away.  Mike was a being in the house with me and we were close.  Grieving his death has been muddled with my Dad's passing and sometimes I feel guilty about that happening.  As time passes the ache becomes less hurtful for both and I am starting to get mostly good memories in its place. Recently I helped celebrate Pablo Neruda's birthday with Jami, my poet and overall very creative friend.  Guests were asked to select one poem written by Neruda to read to the small group who gathered for the celebration.  I picked this one: Ode To The Cat -- Pablo Neruda There was something wrong with the animals: their tails were too long, and they had unfortunate heads. Then they started coming together, little by little fitting together to make a landscape, developing birthmarks, grace, flight. But the cat, only the cat turned out finished, and

Anatomy of a Sock

I've been knitting socks for a relatively short time.  One of the disconcerting things for me as I started following patterns for socks is the pattern designer assumes the knitter (in this case that would be me) knows all the parts of a sock.  So I thought I'd devote a post to improve my own knowledge about the anatomy of a sock and maybe some of you will learn something about the humble yet necessary sock as well. Here's the names of the parts of the foot as I know them. #49 ankle, #50 heel, #51, instep, #52 ball, #53 big toe, #54 toe, #55 little toe, #56 toenail. There are some parts more important for this discussion; first the heel of a foot is generally used to refer to the entire C-shape from the ankle to the instep.  Speaking of the instep, it refers to that curve near the bottom of the foot.  And what seems to be missing in the design above is the sole which generally refers to the bottom of the foot in total or plantar aspect in more technical terms.  (BTW

Yarn Barf

It's back to quirkiness and time to step away again from the cuteness for a while.  But as you see I'm someone who slips from one to the other without much effort so anticipate this back and forth to be my new normal. A dramatization of me in the midst of my startitist frenzy Yarn barf .  I'm willing to bet you hadn't thought of putting those two words together, had you?  It just so happens yarn barf can be a reoccurring pain for those of us who use yarns that come in a skein instead of a hank.  (No pun intended regarding the current Noro virus, well maybe a little pun.) Skeins of yarn wound by the manufacturer These are hanks which need to be wound into balls  If you look closely at the picture on the right you'll see the start on the millet yellow skein at the centre right of the photo.  Its start can easily be seen coming from the centre of the skein onto the violet skein to the left.  Easy to find, right!  Sure but what about the remaining 4