The Christmas Sweater Festival at the Echoplex music club was holiday programming for the tongue-in-cheek generation. The Echo Park venue was awash in appliqued snowmen, flashing pompoms and teal-colored squirrels.
One of the bands on the bill, Pity Party, showed up the other revelers. Chunky red-and-green striped with chubby "Ps" -- the band's initials -- on the front, their sweaters were hand-knit by lead singer Julie Edwards and guitarist Marc Smollin.
It really wasn't fair. Edwards is not only a wizard knitter, she also teaches needle craft at her own shop, The Little Knittery, tucked behind a frontage road in Atwater Village. Los Angeles has thousands of musicians -- and most have day jobs. Edwards has taken hers to another level, weaving her life as an artist and as a small-business owner together into a modern-day salon.
On a given day, crocheters, a costume designer and semi-famous band members, most in their 20s, huddle on the vintage furniture in her tiny store, discussing bunko psychics, crafts and band shake-ups. Baskets of yarn arranged in color groups line the wall, and Edwards' handiwork is scattered about: hand-warmers, knitted owls and Fair Isle hats.
The mix of people makes for incongruities: a middle-aged woman advised Edwards on her romance with a world-famous rock star. Male hipsters exclaimed over scarf and sweater projects by women their mothers' ages. And this reporter batted around mother-daughter issues with a teenage knitting prodigy. I've been going there for a year and I've learned as much about aesthetics as about knitting.
"This is the best thing ever for touring," Orfeo McCord said earlier this month, working on a birthday scarf for his mom.
McCord, percussionist in the bands Fool's Gold and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, met Edwards at a music festival and soon was launching his first knitting project.
"It's meditative," he said. "Bands can do it when they're waiting, instead of smoking cigarettes."
Against a sonic backdrop of custom playlists -- lately, obscure 1960s soul, John Lennon and the Strange Boys, an Austin, Texas, garage band -- Edwards makes everyone part of the flow.
"Sometimes it's hard to make everybody feel like they're in here together," she said, but it usually works. Two of her customers met in a knitting class, had their first date at a Pity Party show and later married, she said.
