Sheepish Abe

Z
The Top Hat Is Wool. So Is the Man Wearing It.:

Five years ago at lunchtime one day, Pedro Genao Rodriguez walked into the kitchen of the Rudolf Steiner School on East 79th Street and saw a teacher poking a barbed needle into a mass of unspun wool, fashioning the wool into a little gnome. Mr. Genao Rodriguez, who works as a custodian at the school, was curious.

"She told me the more times you poke the needle, the more compact the wool becomes," he recalled. The teacher gave him a bit of wool and a needle, introducing Mr. Genao Rodriguez to the craft of needle felting.

He started by making miniature birds and snowmen. Then he made a series of six-inch-long dolls representing members of the school's staff.

By 2003, the needle felting bug had bitten Mr. Genao Rodriguez so hard that he was inspired to make the biggest wool sculpture ever. As part of that pursuit, he wrote to Guinness World Records and inquired about what he described as "The Largest Wool Doll Ever Made." His chance of setting the record was good, he was told, because no such category existed.

Then came the matter of choosing a subject. Mr. Genao Rodriguez picked Abraham Lincoln, "my favorite person in history," he explained.

"He came from a very poor family," added Mr. Genao Rodriguez, a 43-year-old Dominican who immigrated to New York in 1992. "He's an inspiration for people around the world. Also, he was very tall. That's good for the record."

Mr. Genao Rodriguez resolved to create a life-size Abraham Lincoln out of wool. He worked diligently at night in his basement apartment in Corona, Queens; divorced, he lives with his mother, his 14-year-old daughter, his sister and his 16-year-old nephew. He ordered bags of wool from Maine and went through 75 three-inch barbed needles.

After 18 months of felting, his Lincoln was complete. Dressed in a three-piece black suit and a bow tie, with an alert expression in its pale blue eyes, the creation stands, true to life, at 6 feet 4 inches tall, not including the top hat. The work has been displayed at the Steiner School and at the City Reliquary, a museum of oddities in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Mr. Genao Rodriguez has received his application form for the Guinness record and is looking toward his next woolen feats. He dreams of making life-size figures of all the American presidents, with George Washington and Bill Clinton next up. And he said: "I'd like to make Latin American leaders. Good leaders, like Simón Bolívar. Or Sammy Sosa."

Wow... imagine a gallery of presidents, all made out of wool... does Disney know about this? What happens when you wash them? Would a Barry Bonds one have an extra-big head? Can you imagine a non-immigrant American doing something like this?

I guess some might say Mr. Rodriguez is slightly nuts. On the other hand, what have you done in your spare time over the last three years that's worth displaying?

Photo of Pedro Genao Rodriguez's Abraham Lincoln by Angela Jimenez for the Times.