Alphonzo Rawls

Rawls started skating at the age of ten in Oceanside, California.  Quickly climbing the am ranks, he went pro for the iconic skate brand, H-St, later for Expedition.

These days Alf’s creativity — on and off the skateboard — is off the charts. His latest artistic endeavor, large-scale “hand-stitched embroidery” pieces, explore his #everybodyskates ethos.

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"#EVERYBODYSKATES Started simply as my creative expression combining my love for skateboarding and popular culture by using Photoshop to manipulate photos of pop culture icons riding skateboards. I started doing it a few years ago to amuse myself and began posting them on Instagram and it caught on fast with several of the images going viral. I began getting several requests for t-shirt with the images I was creating, eventually landing in Supreme in LA [influential streetwear/skate shop] and growing from there."

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"I’ve always bean a fan of small embroidery and came up with the idea to convert a few of the graphic images I created into small embroideries and was pleased with the results and began making hats and tees with my embroideries on them. I had the task of designing a trade show booth for #EVERYBODYSKATES and was thinking of ways to draw attention to the embroideries on our hats, so the immediate thought was, “How can I take these embroideries and make them bigger?”

I was looking for something that represented a thicker gaged thread and found that yarn was a great option. The pieces I created for the trade show got a lot of interest so I kept on creating them."