Lifestyle

The designer who turned her pain into a colorful crochet brand (spotted on Kendrick Lamar)

Published

2 years ago

March 11, 2024

Krysta Grasso, 27, is the owner of the crochet brand Unlikely Fox.

Surrounded by a sea of colorful yarn, 27-year-old Krysta Grasso lounged on her bed in her West Adams apartment as she crocheted a custom order.

With the yarn in one hand and a crochet hook in the other, she intricately worked in more of the neon pink, highlighter yellow and tortoise blue that she’d hand-dyed in her kitchen. When she was finished, she held up her creation: a fox-ear hat, one of her signature pieces.

Grasso’s crochet brand, Unlikely Fox, is having a shining moment — her designs have been spotted on several musicians, including Grammy award-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar, Malaya (who wore a hat during an NPR Tiny Desk performance) and Amindi.

Still, despite the recent fanfare, Grasso’s days haven’t changed much. This peaceful afternoon looks a lot like the ones she used to spend with her mother, Dunia, who taught her how to crochet when she was about 5. Together, they’d sit on the couch, watching cartoons and romantic comedies for hours as they crocheted everything from scarves to granny squares, which they sometimes turned into blankets.

Grasso enjoyed crocheting simply because “my mom did it,” she said of Dunia, whose signature is tattooed in red on her left forearm. “I just always wanted to be like her. Most of the things she did, I just wanted to do naturally.”

For many years, crocheting was just a hobby for Grasso, who goes by the nickname Fox. She comes from three generations of seamstresses in her Caribbean family — her grandmother owned a sewing boutique in the Chicago area, where Grasso grew up. As a teen, she would sell DIY clothes on Etsy. But it wasn’t until her mother suddenly died in June 2018 from cardiac arrest, just days after having a stroke, that Grasso started crocheting with a new vigor.

At first, it was her way of grieving, an attempt to find bits of joy within each day. And then it became something even more.

A photograph of Krysta Grasso and her late mother, Dunia, is displayed in Grasso’s bedroom and crochet studio.

Krysta Grasso, who is owner of Unlikely Fox, likes to keep the strings loose on her crochet products to showcase the amount of colors and textures she uses.

“After she passed, I realized how deeply connected my crocheting was to her,” Grasso said of her mom, who raised three kids on her own. “I was really motivated to start doing it for a living.”

As she crocheted, Grasso would listen to the Spotify playlists her mom made, which were filled with reggaeton, R&B and soul tracks, and watch their favorite Christmas films. Grasso made vibrant colored hats, swimwear and sweaters. She also started designing crochet sleeves and front hoodie pockets, which she added to vintage T-shirts. “When I’m sad, I tend to gravitate to bright colors,” she said.

While Grasso looked for a job in L.A., she began selling her products at the popular Melrose Trading Post. At the time, she was one of a few crochet artists there. She didn’t make much money in the beginning, but she always received the same compliment from patrons. “People would say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’” she said, adding that they were intrigued by her use of color.

She eventually found a job as a server at a restaurant but was laid off when the pandemic hit. With more free time, she began experimenting with color and hand-dying her own yarn for her crochet work. The hours-long process goes like this: She soaks yarn in citric acid, then places it in a pan on the stove that’s filled with a mix of hot water and dye and lets it sit for a set amount of time to absorb the color. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. Afterward, she takes the pan off the heat to let the yarn cool off, then washes it and lets it dry.

“Color is the thing that I love most about the entire craft,” she said, adding that she’s also intrigued by various textures. In one piece, for example, the fox-ear hat, Grasso may use up to 25 combinations of different colors. She likes to keep the strings loose on her pieces — a distinct style choice — to show how many colors and fibers she uses in her products. No two items are ever the same.

Grasso may use up to 25 combinations of colors for her most vibrant crochet projects.

A tattoo of Grasso’s mother’s name, Dunia. Grasso uses a mix of fibers — mohair, merino wool, cotton, silk, recycled fibers and dead stock acrylic. (Zay Monae/For The Times)

Grasso typically uses a mixture of fibers — mohair, merino wool, cotton, silk, recycled fibers and dead stock acrylic — to avoid buying too much acrylic yarn, which often ends up in landfills because it is produced in abundance and isn’t used quickly enough, she said. The higher-priced fibers are the reason her hats sell for $190 and clothing pieces cost $300 to $1,500.

In early 2021, Grasso started selling skeins of her hand-dyed yarn online, which were a hit. When she released a collection called the “Steven Universe” Yarn Club, based on the Cartoon Network animated series, she made nearly $10,000 in two days off the yarn, which was about $25 to $30 per skein.

“I was incredibly surprised. I’d never had a drop that big. Things definitely changed,” she said. She was working at a bookstore at the time, but this made her realize that she could potentially make Unlikely Fox her main source of income.

Soon after, she quit her job and continued doing monthly yarn drops, which were all inspired by animated shows, video games and movies she liked, including “Chowder,” “Animal Crossing,” “Rick and Morty” and “The Princess and the Frog.”

By that fall, Grasso was selling at the Black Market Flea, a monthly flea market that is brimming with clothing brands and handmade goods, all designed and crafted by Black artisans. Before long, her Unlikely Fox products were selling out, and she was able to make half her income from the market and the other half from her monthly yarn drops.

“I think the Black Market Flea was my target audience,” she said. “Those are my peers, and I think it was much easier to communicate what I was doing to people who looked like me, rather than being a small group of people of color and Black people in such a huge white space.”

Krysta Grasso said each item she crochets is personal and feels like “a piece of me.”

There aren’t many times that you’ll see Grasso without a crochet hook and yarn in her hands.

Stephanie Smith first met Grasso when she was crocheting outside a coffee shop in Leimert Park a couple years ago.

“She was so zoned in and just doing it with ease, and I just thought that was so cool,” said Smith, a photographer, returning customer and now close friend of Grasso. “It was refreshing to see a younger woman crocheting.”

Smith owns about 10 of Grasso’s pieces, including a matching set — a wrap skirt and a bustier-style top with removable sleeves — that she customized for her 26th birthday. “I’ve bought other crochet items [from other designers], but her’s are woven way tighter, and her colors really stand out to me.” Each time Smith wears an Unlikely Fox piece, people flag her down to ask where she got it, she said.

Smith said she appreciates Grasso’s pieces even more because of how personal they are to her.

“I won’t ever get rid of these pieces ever because I feel like it’s a part of my friend and it’s also a part of her mother,” she said.

If you follow Grasso on social media, you know who her mother is. Dunia’s face, which is almost identical to Grasso‘s, is plastered across Grasso’s Instagram feed, and Grasso’s bio says simply “Dunia’s daughter.” Grasso has locs similar to those worn by her mom; she got hers shortly after her mom died. She is also candid online about days when her grief strikes even harder, and she shares the activities she does to help boost her mood, like crocheting and running.

Krysta Grasso with a picture of her late mother, Dunia, who taught her how to crochet when she was 5.

For Grasso, talking about her mom and her grieving process is a necessity. “I think I just have to,” she said. “When I don’t, I feel awful.”

Grasso opens up about her experience online not only because it helps her “but I also want to encourage people to grieve more outwardly. I think just the act of speaking about something, whether it’s painful or not, is really powerful.”

At times, it can feel conflicting for Grasso to sell her crochet work because it’s “a piece of me,” she said. For this reason, she recently shifted from doing flea markets regularly to focusing more on making commission-based pieces and selling limited drops online. That way, she doesn’t have to persuade anyone to buy her work, she said.

She isn’t focusing on Unlikely Fox full time anymore because it was getting “intense.” This has given her the freedom to expand her business slowly and intentionally.

A crocheted sweater from Unlikely Fox’s collection.

She didn’t grow up with a lot of money, she said, “so I know that I will be OK with less.”

In the fall, Grasso will be moving to Portland, Ore., to pursue a bachelor’s degree in graphic design, which she’s been passionate about for years. She plans to continue selling her crochet pieces and doing monthly drops on the Unlikely Fox website. Her long-term goal is to become a full-time knitwear designer and further her career in fashion.

When Grasso reflects on the brand she’s built in her mother’s memory, she says Dunia would think “it’s really cool.”

“I visualize the version of us that could’ve got to live longer together, and I think the two of us would’ve become even cooler people together,” Grasso said, as she stood in her bedroom and studio, which is filled with photos of her mom. “I think she’s proud. I think she just wants me to find my own [way] and not be influenced by the things that are around me and the people around me.”

She smiled and added, “I think she just wants me to keep going.”

Lifestyle

Sunday Puzzle: Pet theory

Published

1 hour ago

January 11, 2026

Press Room

On-air challenge

Today’s puzzle is called “Pet Theory.” Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase or name in which the first word start starts PE- and the second word starts T-. (Ex. What walkways at intersections carry –> PEDESTRIAN TRAFFIC)

1. Chart that lists all the chemical elements

2. Place for a partridge in “The 12 Days of Christmas”

3. Male voyeur

4. What a coach gives a team during halftime in the locker room

5. Set of questions designed to reveal your traits

6. Something combatants sign to end a war

7. Someone who works with you one-on-one with physical exercises

8. Member of the Who

9. Incisors, canines, and premolars that grow in after you’re a baby

10. Nadia Comaneci was the first gymnast to score this at the Olympics

11. What holds the fuel in a British car

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge was a numerical one from Ed Pegg Jr., who runs the website mathpuzzle.com. Take the nine digits — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You can group some of them and add arithmetic operations to get 2011 like this: 1 + 23 ÷ 4 x 5 x 67 – 8 + 9. If you do these operations in order from left to right, you get 2011. Well, 2011 was 15 years ago. Can you group some of the digits and add arithmetic symbols in a different way to make 2026? The digits from 1 to 9 need to stay in that order. I know of two different solutions, but you need to find only one of them.

Challenge answer

12 × 34 × 5 – 6 – 7 + 8 – 9 [or] 1 + 2 + 345 × 6 – 7 × 8 + 9

Winner

Daniel Abramson of Albuquerque, N.M.

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from listener Ward Hartenstein. Think of a well-known couple whose names are often said in the order of _____ & _____. Seven letters in the names in total. Combine those two names, change an E to an S, and rearrange the result to name another famous duo who are widely known as _____ & _____.

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, January 15 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Lifestyle

Paul Gripp, one of the last great orchid explorers and hybridizers, dies at 93

Published

2 hours ago

January 11, 2026

Press Room

Paul Gripp, one of the last great orchid explorers and hybridizers, dies at 93

After retirement, Paul Gripp still visited the nursery often, helping with weeding, as he’s doing here in this file photo, or just talking with customers.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Orchid expert Paul Francis Gripp, a renowned orchid breeder, author and speaker who traveled the world in search of unusual varieties for his nursery, Santa Barbara Orchid Estates, died in a Santa Barbara hospice center on Jan. 2 after a short illness. He was 93.

In a Facebook post on Jan. 4, Gripp’s sister, Toni Gripp Brink, said her brother died “after suffering a brain hemorrhage and loss of consciousness in his longtime Santa Barbara home. He was surrounded by his loving family, day and night, for about a week in a Santa Barbara hospice before he passed.”

Gripp was renowned in the orchid world for his expertise, talks and many prize-winning hybrids such as the Santa Barbara Sunset, a striking Laelia anceps and Laeliocattleya Ancibarina cross with rich salmon, peach and magenta hues that was bred to thrive outside in California’s warmer climes.

In a 2023 interview, Gripp’s daughter, Alice Gripp, who owns and operates the business also known as SBOE with her brother, Parry, said Santa Barbara Sunset is still one of the nursery’s top sellers.

A vibrant orchid with salmon and peach-colored petals and a raspberry and deep-yellow throat.

Gripp was a popular speaker, author and avid storyteller who talked about his experiences searching for orchids in the Philippines, Myanmar (then known as Burma), India, the high Andes, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, New Guinea and other parts of the world, fostering exchanges with international growers and collecting what plants he could to propagate, breed and sell in his Santa Barbara nursery.

“Working in orchids has been like living in a dream,” Gripp said in a 2023 interview. “There’s thousands of different kinds, and I got to travel all over to find things people would want. But the first orchid I found? It was in Topanga Creek, Epipactis gigantea, our native orchid, and you can still find them growing in [California’s] streams and canyons today.”

Gripp was “one of the last orchid people who went looking for these plants in situ — where they occurred in nature,” said Lauris Rose, one of his former employees who is now president of the Santa Barbara International Orchid Show and owner of Cal-Orchid Inc., a neighboring nursery that she started with her late husband James Rose, another SBOE employee who died in January 2025.

These days, Rose said in an interview on Thursday, orchids are considered “something to enhance the beauty of your home,” but when she and her husband first began working with Gripp in the 1970s, “they were something that totally captivated your interest and instilled a wanderlust spirit that made you want to explore the species in the plant kingdom, as they grew in nature, not as produced in various colors from laboratories.”

She said Gripp’s charm and self-deprecating demeanor also helped fuel his success. “People flocked for the experience of walking around that nursery and learning things from him,” Rose said in a 2023 interview.

“Paul lectured all over the world, teaching people about different species of orchids in a very accessible way,” Rose said. “He didn’t act like a professor. He got up there with anecdotes like, ‘One time I climbed up this tree trying to reach a plant in another tree, and all these red ants infested my entire body, so I had to take off all my clothes and rub all these ants off my body.’ A lot of people’s lectures are boring as dirt, but Paul could command a room. He had charisma, and it was infectious.”

Gripp was born on Oct. 18, 1932, in Greater Los Angeles and grew up in Topanga Canyon. He went to Santa Monica College and then UCLA, where he earned a degree in horticulture, and worked as a gardener on weekends, primarily for Robert J. Chrisman, a wealthy Farmers Insurance executive and hobbyist orchid grower who lived in Playa del Rey.

After college, Gripp served a stint in the Navy after the Korean War, and when he got out, he called Chrisman, his old boss, who invited him to come to Santa Barbara and manage the orchid nursery he was starting there.

A man in a blue jacket and cap bends over a table of sprouting young orchids.

The nursery opened in 1957, with Gripp as its manager, and 10 years later, after Chrisman died, he purchased SBOE from the Chrisman family.

In 1986, Gripp and his then-wife, Anne Gripp, divorced. In the settlement, Gripp got their cliff-side Santa Barbara home with its breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean, and his former wife got the nursery. When Anne Gripp died, her children Parry and Alice inherited the nursery and took over its operation in 1994, Alice Gripp said in 2023.

Gripp officially retired from the nursery, but he was a frequent helper several times a week, weeding, dividing plants, answering customer questions and regaling them with his orchid-hunting stories.

“Paul loves plants, but what he loves most in life is teaching other people about orchids,” Alice Gripp said in 2023. “He chats with them, and I try to take their money.”

Gripp wasn’t a huge fan of the ubiquitous moth orchids (Phalaenopsis) sold en masse in most grocery store floral departments, but he was philosophical about their popularity.

They’re good for indoor plants, he said in 2023, but don’t expect them to live very long. “A house is a house, not a jungle,” he said, “so there’s a 99% chance they’re going to die. But they’re pretty cheap [to buy], so it works out pretty good.”

“He used to say, ‘I’m an orchid man. I love every orchid equally,’ and he does,” his daughter said in 2023. “I don’t know if he would run into a burning building to save a Phalaenopsis from Trader Joe’s, but he told me once, ‘I’ve never thrown out a plant.’ And that’s probably true. When he was running things, the aisles were so crammed people were always knocking plants off the benches because they couldn’t walk through.”

Gripp is survived by his children and his second wife, Janet Gripp, as well as his sister Toni Gripp Brink. In a post on the nursery’s website on Jan. 5, the Gripp family asked for privacy.

“We are still very much grieving Paul’s sudden passing,” the message read. “If you would like to share your memories of Paul, please send them by mail or email for us to read in the days to come. We will welcome your remembrances and gather these into a scrapbook to keep at SBOE. We appreciate your understanding of our need for peaceful reflection at this time. In the coming weeks, we will announce our plans for honoring and remembering Paul with our orchid friends.”

Lifestyle

Veteran actor T.K. Carter, known for ‘The Thing’ and ‘Punky Brewster,’ dies at 69

Published

13 hours ago

January 11, 2026

Press Room

Veteran actor T.K. Carter, known for ‘The Thing’ and ‘Punky Brewster,’ dies at 69

Actor TK Carter arrives for the premiere of “The LA Riot” at the Tribeca Film Festival, Monday, April 25, 2005, in New York.

Mary Altaffer/AP

hide caption

toggle caption

Mary Altaffer/AP

DUARTE, Calif. — Veteran actor T.K. Carter, who appeared in the horror film “The Thing” and “Punky Brewster” on television, has died at the age of 69.

Carter was declared dead Friday evening after deputies responded to a call regarding an unresponsive male in Duarte, California, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Police did not disclose a cause of death or other details, but said no foul play was suspected.

Thomas Kent “T.K.” Carter was born Dec. 18, 1956, in New York City and was raised in Southern California.

He began his career in stand-up comedy and with acting roles. Carter had been acting for years before a breakthrough role as Nauls the cook in John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, “The Thing.” He also had a recurring role in the 1980s sitcom “Punky Brewster.”

Other big-screen roles include “Runaway Train” in 1985, “Ski Patrol” in 1990 and “Space Jam” in 1996.

“T.K. Carter was a consummate professional and a genuine soul whose talent transcended genres,” his publicist, Tony Freeman, said in a statement. “He brought laughter, truth, and humanity to every role he touched. His legacy will continue to inspire generations of artists and fans alike.”