Imagine a room with 50s decor where everything's made from wool. Knitted cakes, teapots, cups and biscuits — even a knife and loaf of crusty white bread — while over in the corner sits a knitted valve mantel radio. The big question is — why?

Life in an old people's home sometimes needs a focus. Residents feel they've outgrown their usefulness, but don't want to just sit around passively. Imagine then if you could recreate the past, taking yourself back to a gentler time when life was simple, people were decent and fair. Now imagine if you could do it with just a few balls of wool... exactly as they've done at Hobart's Strathaven Home.

The creativity on show is amazing. There's an Elvis album cover with an actual vinyl record half out of its sleeve. All knitted... and knitted very, very well: it must have taken a lot of work and a lot of imagination. No patterns exist to create something like that.

It's self-perpetuating, too, says Robyn: The minute one person comes up with an idea, somebody else gets an idea feeding off from that, so it just expands and grows. Knitted Wellington boots, knitted potplants, a knitted sink, a knitted stove — knitted Vegemite jars and jam jars. I bet everyone in the room could add another ten things that remind them of where they were in the 1950s.

Strathaven folk knit themselves a room — ABC Tasmania (via Boing Boing)