No relatives named Kelly.
Doesn't sound like you had that pot hooked up right. An LED should light off 1K and a 12V supply without turning the knob at all.
Sounds like you made a voltage divider out of it. Did you have the LED on the wiper or the 12V? Did you try to run a bunch of LED's in parallel? Don't do it that way -
Led's never have EXACTLY the same forward voltage drop characteristics. One will run a little lower than the other, and take the lion's share of the current. What you want to do for this circuit is run them in sets of 3 in series, giving you about a 9.6V drop. 12V - 9.6V = 2.4V, so then you add a 120Ω resistor (1/4 watt is fine, 1/10th watt 1206 SMT is fine) in series with that. Connect 33 of these series chains in parallel, and it will pull .33A from the 12V supply, for a total of about 4 watts. That's about as efficient as you are going to get at this level.
I look forward to hearing how your LED conversion works out!