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Shine Your Light
Ignite your creativity and stave off seasonal blues with these cozy indoor hobbies.
By Rachel Saslow
There are more than 15 hours of darkness a day in Oregon around the winter solstice. The list of things we cannot easily do this season is long, and admittedly pleasurable: tend to the roses, sunbathe, picnics. But let’s not let the darkness outside dim our inner lights.
Winter is the perfect season to nourish our creativity with some indoor hobbies—all the better if they are warm and cozy. Hunkering down with a knitting project, lap piled high with woolly yarn on its way to becoming a sweater? Yes, please. Clicking the final piece into place on a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle? So satisfying. The blast of warm air and the smell of fresh bread when you open the oven? It almost makes you dread the June sunshine. (Almost.)
We rounded up three of our favorite seasonal, indoor hobbies and found some local businesses to help get us started. While these can be enjoyed as solitary hobbies, we also added an out-of-the-house option for the extroverts out there, or anyone trying to stave off seasonal depression with some in-person human contact. Happy hobbying.
Knit Up a Storm
Just like there are fair-weather fans, there are foul-weather knitters. Our yarn baskets and needles sit untouched for months but as soon as the rainy season begins, we choose patterns and get busy. Fuchsia Troutman, owner of Weird Sisters (8836 N Lombard St., 971-865-5941, weirdsistersyarn.com) in St. Johns, is herself a year-round knitter but understands the need to tailor her projects to the season. In the summer, she knits things like tank tops and accessories. In the winter, she gravitates toward big, cozy sweaters, blankets and cardigans.
“A giant woolly blanket on my lap when it’s 100 degrees is not going to feel good,” Troutman says.
But it’s going to feel divine in January. Maybe add a fireplace, a great playlist, and a warm beverage? (Just make sure it’s non-alcoholic—booze is murder on keeping stitches consistent.)
Weird Sisters further leans into the season with its winter solstice boxes. For $150, the lucky 25 customers who were able to snag one of the mystery boxes (pre-orders sold out in September; Troutman is figuring out how to scale up this popular offering) will receive surprise handmade goodies such as custom-dyed yarn, stitch markers, tea, candles, wheel-thrown mugs, and a book from Two Rivers Bookstore, which operates in the same St. Johns storefront as Weird Sisters. This year’s theme: “The longest night brings new light.”
Leave the House: Most neighborhood yarn shops offer free, recurring stitching groups, which are a great chance to socialize plus get tips from more veteran needleworkers. Try knit night at Starlight Knitting Society (7028 SE 52nd Ave., 503-777-1715, starlightknittingsociety.com) from 6 to 8 pm every Wednesday.
Puzzle Me This
Jigsaw puzzles were a bona fide pandemic craze in 2020, with puzzlemakers reporting sales booms of 300% to 400%, year over year. And then some puzzle solvers…just kept going, soothed by the straightforward, tactile task of creating order out of chaos. And the Rose City is a puzzling hub, with Pomegranate and Portland Puzzle Company headquartered here, the latter of which hosts one of the country’s top speed puzzling tournaments.
Stocking up on puzzles can be as simple as swinging by Goodwill, the library or a neighborhood puzzle exchange station. But if you really want to treat yo’self, try a $199 bundle of all 10 puzzles used in the 2024 Portland Jigsaw Masters tournament, including two 1,000-piecers and one 120-piece double-sided puzzle.
Also, Music Millennium released a limited-edition, 500-piece puzzle this fall featuring an image of the 55-year-old record store by Portland artists Lyn Nance-Sasser and Stephen Sasser, available as a Kickstarter fundraiser.
Leave the House: Try a speed puzzling event on Tuesday nights at The People’s Courts (2700 NE 82nd Ave., 503-455-4843, portlandpuzzle.com/speedpuzzling). It’s $35 for a team of four.
Get Baked
Getting your hands on a sourdough starter in this town is as easy as asking a neighbor or stopping by the local bakery. Tabor Bread (4438 SE Belmont St., 971-279-5530, taborbread.com) sells levain starter for $3, or it’s free with a bag of flour, for example. But lately, people are clamoring to get their hands on Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter.
As legend has it, Griffith’s ancestors traveled by wagon train from Missouri to Salem in 1847, and it has been kept as pure as possible ever since. Griffith died in 2000, but if you go to carlsfriends.net, volunteer culture keepers now headquartered in Greeley, Colo., will send you a free, semi-dry sourdough starter ready to be revived (you’ll have to cover postage). Griffith’s starter went viral on TikTok in early 2024, so there might still be a bit of a delay in receiving it.
Leave the House: Give baked goods to your neighbors and you’ll be everyone’s favorite house on the block.
This story is a part of Oregon Winter, Willamette Week’s annual winter activity magazine. It is free and can be found all over Portland beginning Friday, December 13, 2024. Find your free copy at one of the locations noted here or at our online store, before they all get picked up!