Peter & Lorraine Karassik
wool hats, scarves & pincushions
turned wood spoons & bowls
yachats
When Lorraine Karassik first started dying wool in the 1970s, she used only the pigments she found in nature, like ferns, Scotch broom, nettles and carrot tops. She enjoyed their organic quality, of course, but eventually found that the colors they produced didn’t thrill her soul.
“I kept coming to dead ends. (With natural dyes) you just don’t get a big range of colors. Everything is muted and a little browned out,” she said. “I decided that I just wanted something that’s bright. I want to fill my eyes with color.”
For Lorraine, the process begins in the fields near her home off Hwy. 34, near the border of Lincoln and Benton counties. She and her husband Peter raise Romney sheep, and Lorraine washes, dries, dyes, picks and cards wool for her vivid array of hats, scarves, purses and pincushions. Peter carves wooden spoons and bowls, and they both exhibit at the Yachats Farmers Market every Sunday.
In her first season as a market vendor, she didn’t really know what to sell or how to sell it. “I took all the things I had ever made and put them on the table. It was like a little show for me, and it didn’t matter to me if it sold or not.”
Over time, she combined her ideas and the public’s comments into a variety of products. Her wool hats are hand-felted, rolled and shrunk into three-dimensional patterns and adorned with pleats, tails and sculptural forms. She makes long, bumpy ropes she calls dreads, woven scarves with sari silk waste, and roundish buttons of sculpted wool that are open to interpretation.
“I call them pincushion agates because they have twisty, twirly and wiggly, with different colors of wool layered together, washed and dried, then cut with an electric knife. When they’re done, people see all sorts of things in them: dinosaurs, dragons, anemones in the water. It’s sort of like a Rorschach test.”
“My booth is really bright, to some people’s dismay. Sometimes they say, ‘Whoa! Don’t you have anything conservative?’ I say, ‘why should I do that?’”
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