Hasta La Ideas

For those of you seeking a bespoke sweater the size of a thumb drive, look no further than the work of Althea Crome. Althea was a contributing artist for sweet knitwear in the stop-motion flick Coraline, which featured a couple of her glamorous and well-fitting sweaters. One glance through her adorable but incomprehensibly tiny line of work and it’s clear why she was picked to be a high-profile puppet clothier. Her work with miniatures requires the already taxing skillset of a talented knitter and ramps up the difficulty to the point that she sometimes needs knitting needles near the width of a human hair.

And these aren’t your standard squint-and-they-look-believable-I-guess Barbie style doll clothes. Her knitting is on par with more conceptual sweater designs at full scale, to say nothing of the competition at 1:12 scale (because there isn’t any). Despite the glaring oddness of knitting with homemade needles the size of pins, much of her work features ornate patterning, intricate designs, and fine materials like Japanese silk or cashmere thread. Oh, and let’s up the artsy ante by throwing in some fine art reproductions and face cards.

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