Alice Springs Beanie Festival: Celebrating 20 years of beanies

Winter nights can be chilly in Alice Springs, making it the perfect place to celebrate the humble beanie.

Alice Springs Beanie Festival started humbly too, in 1997 when local teacher Adi Dunlop began showing Indigenous women in the remote Central Australian community of Yuendumu how to crochet. Most of the women had never worked with wool before, but they ended up making 100 beanies that year, which Dunlop took back to Alice and sold to her friends at a "beanie party" with the proceeds going back to the community.

"Everybody thought they were fantastic," says Jo Nixon, Dunlop's niece, who has been running the festival ever since.

"They said, 'Can we do this again next year?' So we did, and it's grown from 100 beanies to 6600 beanies."

The four-day festival is held at Araluen Arts Centre at the end of June, and it's huge. There's Beanie Central, where those 6600 beanies were sent in from all over Australia this year (about a quarter of them from Central Australia), and the National Beanie Competition and Exhibition of 300 wearable artworks, from around Australia and overseas. There are workshops, food trucks and stalls, and live entertainment.

This year's festival kicks off with a free opening-night party under the stars on the Friday night. There's a Welcome to Country and a few speeches and the competition winners are announced. Then Nixon is crowned "Queen Beanie" and presented with a 20th anniversary beanie decorated with 20 crochet hooks and declares the 2016 exhibition open. The crowd surges into the arts centre and the warmth of its central heating to peruse and purchase the beanies on display.

Felt is big this year, so are animal motifs (including Nemo, budgies, kangaroos and a menagerie of embroidered moths), and entries span the creative spectrum from the Hair Beanie made from human beard trimmings to the most exquisite tea cosies ever to grace a teapot.

The next morning at Beanie Central, I join hundreds of Alice locals and tourists swarming around tables piled high with hand-made beanies, trying them on, Instagramming beanie selfies, asking strangers for fashion advice. Everyone is in high spirits, while trying to decide which beanies to buy: the plain knitted beanie one could wear to a football match, the matching-pair breast beanies, maybe the sea-green mohair slouch beanie sparkling with sequins? There's something for everyone. That's the beauty of a beanie: anyone with a head can wear one.

Outside, Indigenous women sit at long plastic tables quietly teaching and demonstrating crocheting, weaving, knitting, spinning and needle-felting, which is particularly popular in the communities. "It's a faster medium to work with," says Nixon, "but it's also more rewarding and they can use more pictures in it than they can with crocheting, which allows them to be more creative."