Hoodwinked
It’s unclear whether Jeff Root
believes that idle hands are the devil’s playground. But while you or I might
fritter away holiday downtime at the folks’ house with a little TV or a big
nap, a couple Christmases ago a bored Root decided to monkey around in the
Kendall studio of his mom, an avid quilter. A few wool scraps and some thread
later, a little cat-monster followed him out.
Upon returning to his San Francisco
home, Root, a former projectionist at the Little and the Cinema, was encouraged
by his friends to create more critters, and the crude cat-monster has evolved
over the last two years into a lovable West Coast species called
Woollyhoodwinks. There are now five different sandwich-sized Woollyhoodwinks
— Junco, Ludic, Reddy, Ozard, and Fluke — that currently have the City by
the Bay abuzz with their pointy yet boxy cuteness and free trinkets with
purchase. Root has fashioned all of his Woollyhoodwinks by hand, but he
recently sent out fabric for machine-cutting to keep up with demand. So until
the next batch gets assembled in late winter, the available Woollyhoodwinks are
entirely homespun.
The Woollyhoodwinks website
(www.woollyhoodwinks.com) is a visual and aural delight, thanks to the
whimsically elegant graphic design of marketing director Scott Runcorn and the
impossibly catchy Woollyhoodwinks animated theme song, with words and music by
San Francisco lo-fi artist Phil Dumesnil. The lyrics make some surprising
assertions: Woollyhoodwinks don’t always come in peace, they can read our
minds, and in order to survive “they sit, they stare, they think, they care,
they wink.”
Journalistic integrity compels me to
mention that the Woollyhoodwinks can’t actually wink, but the other claims
check out. They sit and stare constantly, and now that I look at Ludic, my
Woollyhoodwink, it’s obviously thinking and caring, and no doubt infiltrating
my thoughts.
— Dayna Papaleo
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2005.
