What does one do as they near the age of 90 and can no longer pursue their love of traveling, gardening and hiking in the alps, they return to their first love of textiles, Anne-Lise Droege says as she is knitting one of her latest one of a kind designed pillows. About 2 years ago, I approached my mother with the idea of getting back into knitting so that she could supply custom pillows for my client's and for my stagings in order to give my designs a more unique look. She initially said, who would want to buy my pillows. It took some convincing and after seeing what other types of knitted pillows where on the market, she said, "we'll I could do that, that's easy and in fact I can do that even better". Almost 50 some pillows later, her passion has returned in full force and she is as busy as ever, choosing the yarns, pillow inserts, colors, drawing out her own patterns on graph paper and knitting her vision. Once they have been thoroughly viewed by me in wonderment, she tags and prices them. She has become a one woman industry and will be celebrating her 90th Birthday next month.
When she was younger and still living in Germany, she studied textiles at the Textile Engineering College in Krefeld where she obtained a Master Weavers diploma. Many of her teachers at the time came from the Bauhaus Era which was in full bloom again after the war. This style is what has influenced her sense of simplicity, clean lines and natural materials. She estimates that in her lifetime she has knitted millions of stitches and developed hundreds of different designs. Today after a long hiatus, with the completion of each new pillow come another design idea for the next, with no end in sight. To view just a few of them, check out the website section called Just Pillows.
