Inspiration

When they pulled out of the driveway of the first home they’d ever purchased on a small acreage outside of Boise, Idaho, Craig and Kari Bodmer looked at each other and promised that they’d be back, that someday they would return to a life on the land. Their careers, Kari's as a CPA and controller of a grocery store chain and Craig's as a communications director for a large manufacturing company, were requiring so much of their time and energy that they couldn't properly care for their garden, fruit trees, animals and land.

That was 1992. By 2002 they were able to return to the land and fulfill that promise. By then they had moved to Portland, Oregon, and had fallen in love with the beauty and the lifestyle in western Oregon. After a meandering trip in a camper van on the back roads from the Oregon coast to Key West, Florida, and back, they began to look for land upon which to build a new life and soon found a spot in the midst of the beautiful Oregon Wine Country that included every single one of the items on the wish list they had built to guide their search.

As they began to work their new piece of land, fencing, building gardens, planting fruit trees, creating pastures, they began to explore the possibility of building Craig’s love of weaving into a cottage industry patterned after other artisan businesses.

After a year of weaving and thinking and planning, they decided to make it happen. Craig converted what had been a barn on the property into a weaving studio and the looms were ordered to arrive when the studio was ready. In the mean time, Kari worked to build the finishing and binding processes for the blankets and set up the systems they would need to introduce the blankets to their future customers.

Today the enterprise is thriving and life on their beautiful piece of land is busy, productive and fulfilling in a deeply satisfying sort of way. Each of their blankets is the result of an individual effort to create the finest blanket to be found anywhere. The goal is that each one be a showcase for the fine art of weaving and the definition of what a blanket ultimately can be.