She designed jumpers worn by Princess Diana and Olivia Newton-John, then lost everything

Eighties knitwear designer Liz Newman walks into a gallery space hung with the quirky, colourful jumpers made from patterns she created decades ago.

She thought these designs were lost forever.

"I'm absolutely amazed, a bit overwhelmed, and just awe-struck," Ms Newman said, looking around at dozens of newly knitted jumpers sporting the Australiana themes she developed in her early 20s, and some well-kept originals.

At just 20, Liz Newman started a knitwear label that became globally renowned.

She said it really took off in the mid-80s when Hey Hey It's Saturday star Jacki MacDonald started wearing her jumpers.

"Every time Jacki wore one of the designs on Hey Hey, the Channel Nine switchboard would jam with people wanting to know where they could get the knitwear," Ms Newman said.

From a boutique in Twin Street in the Adelaide CBD, she was selling jumpers to stars like ice-skating duo Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, Olivia Newton-John, and even Princess Diana.

Stars align in the US

She ventured into the US at the time the Australian international hit Crocodile Dundee arrived in cinemas, with designs like "Australian pizza with the lot", a jumper covered with Aussie tourism icons.

"Australiana was very, very popular and Americans couldn't seem to get enough of anything Aussie," Ms Newman said.

"All the stars seemed to align, and it just took off."

At the height of her success, she was supplying 150 stores in the US, two Liz Newman boutiques in Sydney, one in Melbourne, another in Surfers Paradise and the original Adelaide store.

She was employing more than 500 hand knitters, many based in country locations around Australia, to make the jumpers using intarsia, a style of knitting complex patterns using multiple colours.

"It was a huge part of my life and an amazing time of my life, and then it all ended very quickly,"

Ms Newman said.

Hard times ahead

A culmination of unfortunate events, including the collapse of the SA Bank, led to the label's demise in the mid-1990s.

"The state bank was going under, and they took me with them," Ms Newman said.

"It was probably one of the worst periods of my life because I had worked so hard."

But there were more hard times to come.

In 2011 she was diagnosed with a brain tumour that she said was the size of an orange by the time it was eventually identified in an MRI scan.

She said the doctors likened it to dismantling a time bomb.

"They said, 'Liz you don't have that much time, there's been so much wear and tear on it, that it's likely to burst'.

"If I'd continued, I'd have three months left to live."

Rock bottom

After she recovered from the operation, she had to spend 14 months in brain injury rehab, learning how to do everything again.

"Even making a cup of coffee was a challenge," she said.

"I knew you needed a kettle, I knew you needed coffee and sugar and milk, but I couldn't remember what to do first."

Ms Newman said confronting her mortality led her to make some big life decisions.

"I made a promise to myself that I'd make big changes and leave a very unhappy relationship," she said.

It was not an easy journey.

At rock bottom, she was living in housing trust accommodation and surviving on the disability pension.

"It's been really hard. I don't have any superannuation, I don't have anything to fall back on, and surviving on a pension is really hard,"

she said.

Meanwhile, her now vintage jumpers were selling for huge sums of money, but Ms Newman had kept only six of them, and lamented the loss of the patterns, which had been sold off with the business while she was unwell.

"My cousin rang me, he works in South Korea, and he said there was a shop with one of my jumpers in the window and it was $1,000," she said.

Another turn of fate

A social media post and a chance encounter with vintage clothing collector and media personality Amanda Blair led to another turn of fate in Ms Newman’s life journey.

Ms Blair, an avid collector of 80s jumpers, had recently gifted a mohair Liz Newman featuring bears doing Aerobics Oz Style to friend and popular podcaster Monique Bowley, who posted it to Instagram.

When Ms Newman introduced herself as the designer of the jumper, the story of the missing patterns intrigued Ms Blair, who already had a sizeable Liz Newman collection.

"I used to get on eBay and search for ugly Australian jumpers," Ms Blair said.

"That's not to say that Liz Newman jumpers are ugly, but I wanted to preserve some South Australian fashion history.

"I think I've watched CSI far too many times, and watched too many crime shows, and I'm like, 'I am going to find those patterns for her'.

"And I did. I found the patterns."

Facebook Marketplace led Ms Blair to a seller, who was helping an elderly couple who had bought the Liz Newman business after the state bank fiasco.

It turned out they still had the 300 patterns stored in the cellar of their home in Birdsville in the northern Adelaide Hills.

"Liz was huge nationally, and internationally, from Twin Street in Adelaide," Ms Blair said.

"These jumpers were worn in New York; they were worn on the catwalks of Paris.

"She really spearheaded the whole kind of fashion movement of Australiana jumpers.

"To be able to preserve that, and then say to this woman, 'Hey, guess what, I found your patterns, and they're coming back to you', it's just awesome."

Twelve years after promising Ms Newman she would find her patterns, Amanda Blair not only returned the treasure trove of designs, but with the help of volunteers from the Hand Knitters Guild of South Australia, recreated 34 of her designs for a surprise exhibition.

Ms Newman only learned about the project two months ago.

She says she didn't dream it would be so big.

"To meet Amanda and for all this to happen, and for her to know that she had found the patterns, and that secretly she was organising this incredible surprise, the amount of work that she did was just amazing.

"This has given me something to look forward to, the possibility of doing something else.

"I think the jumpers were fun, and now I'm starting to get that sense of fun back in my life."