| Knitted Rock Stars |
About Me!
The first rock star I made was Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd, as a present for
my friend, Mitch when we were at school together. Syd had really big hair, but
he could have been anyone really.
Crazy Days I carried on knitting while I was studying. By this time I'd moved on to
characters from The Magic Roundabout, which I made up the patterns for as I went
along. I also made Clangers. A friend found a pattern in an old 1971 annual. You
can find the pattern online now - check the link on the Resources page.
That was it for a little while....I got a job in a sewing shop, where I
became hooked on dressmaking. I made lots of flowery shift dresses, outrageously
short mini skirts (well, the less fabric you need the cheaper it works out!) By
this time I was going to lots of 60's clubs and getting into more and more
obscure 60's psych bands.
I moved to London in 1996 and my Woolly Sgt. Pepper Beatles came with
me........ Fluke! The Mojo Article Business
Now!...
Early Years
I started knitting at a very young age. My grandma taught me when I was about 5
or 6. She had a pattern for some nursery rhyme dolls in an old 70's magazine so
my first knitted dolls were Little Boy Blue, Little Miss Muffett, with a woolly
spider and Little Bo Peep, and I think I even made a sheep for her!
I grew up a bit and made a lot of character dolls during one long summer holiday
between my first and second year at University. I was really into Victorian Art
and made most of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Thomas Hardy. I was
obviously more than a little crazy. It was a long dull summer, but by the end of
it I'd made my first set of Sgt. Pepper Beatles.
I was living in a house share with a guy who played guitar in a mod band. One
day I'd gone out to work and left my door open. That day a guy called Terry
Rawlins came over. Terry is the author of many books on 60's mod culture.
There's a link to his Amazon profile on my Resources page. He saw my Beatles and
wanted a set, so I made him some. I left them for him to collect at my friends'
60's/70's retro clothes shop. Check out What the Butler Wore, Lower Marsh
Street, Waterloo - it's excellent! I didn't think too much about it until I got
a call from my friends at the shop telling me a journalist from Mojo magazine
wanted to write a feature about me! This was one of those amazing flukes that
can only happen in London.
This was the biggest shock ever! I knew a few people in really great, but
unsuccessful bands who would have loved to be in Mojo magazine and I felt almost
unworthy to get a double page feature in the April 2000 Edition because of my
knitting! Paul Weller is on the cover, see page 24-25. I share one of my pages
with Chris Hillman from the Byrds, one of my absolute favourite bands. Read the
article in full in the Press section. Mojo took some lovely pictures of The
Beatles, The Who, The Byrds and asked me to make Led Zeppelin for a competition
prize. I barely had access to the Internet but just about managed to set up a
web mail account for 'Woolly Rockers' - the name 'Woolly Rockers' seemed to make
up its self in my local pub one night just before the interview. From the moment
the magazine was published life became a little crazy! It was picked up on some
sort of newswire, I was interviewed by the BBC on their radio Breakfast show. I
also did an interview for Icelandic radio and some of my dolls were featured in
a 'Puppets in Pop' Exhibition in Brighton.
I had absolutely loads of emails from people every day asking me to make lots of
different dolls - so many different crazy dolls for slightly crazy obsessive pop
fans. It was great! It was just what I wanted to do, so I made the difficult,
scary decision to quit my job to do it full time. During this boom time I stayed
at home knitting from 8am to midnight every day, more or less non-stop, except
for trips to the post office. This was all great fun for quite a few months but
it was a fine line between going for it and struggling. I thought about
advertising more and possibly getting more orders but I was worried that I'd get
more than I could cope with making on my own. I didn't want the dolls to lose
their special unique quality. I wanted to make every one from start to finish
with the same attention to detail. Lots of friends advised me to go for it and
get people to help me, even offering the services of their Mums and grannies! I
loved the amazing variety and was constantly surprised and amused by the amazing
diversity of the requests I got and I didn't want to become a production line
making the same characters over and over again. So, I chickened out, let it all
run its course, stopped chasing after any more orders and went back to the
comparatively easy 9 to 5 life, thinking that I'd had an amazing lucky break and
made the most I could of a fantastic opportunity and had a lot of fun and made a
few people happy doing something I loved. That was in 2000.......
| Knitted Rock Stars |
©
2007 Liz Powner