Alice Springs seldom sleeps past six am thanks to her incessant reflux and uncle Stavros’ bantam roosters crowing in the day.
But really that is the least of her worries for worrying is her greatest worry, worrying about being on time, measuring up, of fitting in, finishing tasks, starting new ones, and most of all the fear of failure.
Alice could well have given up, fallen in a heap and hidden away forever, except that her early rising had given way to a peculiar diligence, a diligence not found very often, for she had taken up knitting in the wee hours of each day. And over the years of extraordinary application she has gone on to become a shining light in the knitting world, creating and now dressing some of the most whimsical of things in knotted yarn, with a pearl stitch here and a dropped stitch over there and a gallant twist and twirl of her needles.
Alice’s talent appears to know no boundaries giving rise to such memorable projects as the very popular Eccles Aristocrat caravan New Zealand’s finest, dressed in some 1769 yards of grade IV yarn, now doing the rounds of rural South Australia; the water resistant cloak of wool blanketing the Muckandup Mechanics Institute; and most recently the somewhat controversial coating of the Giant Bungarra on the outskirts of Bootleggers Bluff.
One can only wonder at what heights Ms Springs will climb to over her extraordinary purling career. We can only wait with knitted brow for her next wild and woolly creation.
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Alice is an original sculpture made from many layers of vintage and antique textiles over clay and wire. Pop over here to check her out.