Archive for the ‘Guardian Angels’ Category

Knitting with Joy

Friday, January 28th, 2011

Thanks to everyone who came out last weekend to make cherry blossoms for the Historic Joy Kogawa House Yarn Bombing. We had a great turnout of enthusiastic crafty-types and Historic Joy Kogawa House has been receiving lovely pink blossoms in the mail. We can’t wait to sew them all together and onto the tree!

Here are a few photos last Sunday’s event:


A plethora of crocheted cherry blossoms from North Vancouver!

Mandy gives a knitting lesson.

I talked about the global movement of yarn bombing and showed some of my favorite photos of knit graffiti.

Everybody knitted with pink yarn!

Poet and novelist Joy Kogawa was present too,  if only in cut-out format.

After a day of knitting, we measure the beloved cherry tree in preparation for the yarn bombing on March 6th.

If you are local and couldn’t make it out last Sunday – please consider joining us in making cherry blossoms on Saturday, February 5th between 2-3:30. If you don’t live in the Vancouver area, you can still contribute by mailing in blossoms to Historic Kogawa House. We will take blossoms of any style and any type of yarn – as long as they are pink!

(A special thanks to photographer Jeff Christenson for capturing the afternoon.)

Knit Graffiti Round-up

My mailbox has been heavy with new yarn bombing feats – while we have much to post in the way of interviews and new yarn bombers trying their odds at sneakiness, here are a few noteworthy links of late:

You can now read Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti in German! The book has been translated by Droemer Knaur.

We’ve been giddy about Olek’s winter yarn bombing of the great brass bull on Wall Street in NYC and we hope you are too. While the knitting only lasted one night, videos are forever. If you haven’t seen this video, it is a must watch.

Speaking of large mammels: a yarn-bombed Hippo in Berlin (via the industrious KnitHacker)

More cozy trees in Brooklyn.

Lovely video of Dot Vile yarnbombing in Philly.

Genny’s birthday is coming up, and rather than pub crawling, she is inviting her friends to yarn ‘crawl’ aka bomb. Nice!

80 year old woman may or may not know that she is yarn bombing. What do you think?

Also via KnitHacker, I am absolutely charmed by this variation of the Chelsea Gunn’s monster foot pattern from our Yarn Bombing book: http://knithacker.com/2011/01/24/dragon-foot-yarn-bomb-spotted-in-saarbrucken/. It is the cutest monstrosity that I have ever seen.

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Posted in Arsenal Pulp Press, Artist talk, Book, Colour, Crochet, Guardian Angels, Historic Joy Kogawa House, installation, Submission Call, Vancouver, Yarn Bombing | 8 Comments »

Garden of Delight

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

This just in from Auckland, New Zealand:

Correspondent Sue Gardiner writes:

The Auckland based Stitch N Bitch Group Lisa, Jo, Jill, Helen, Halcyon ( and me Sue) who have been meeting now for almost 20 years, made this yarn bombing project in my front garden while I was away on holiday. It was a surprise birthday present for me, discovered when my husband Bill and I returned, jetlagged from Europe. It was a wonderful surprise.

Five of them spent 5 hours working in the garden much to the amusement of neighbours, and passersby, after spending months secretly gathering knitted items from second hand shops all over Auckland. They then stitched the knitting around our trees using bright coloured yarns and good ol blanket stitch and added extra crocheted flowers into the mix- even winding felt flowers around my wisteria vine which they know never flowers when it is meant to. We found more crocheted flowers around other parts of the garden over the next few days and even found photographs of me they had inserted into the knitted segments. The main colour theme was violet- as that is my favourite flower but other colours were added in too. It is a really detailed project that we will try to keep up as long as possible and treasure it for ever. It has endured really heavy rain here over the last week, something that worried the SNB members but I can report it is all intact and looking good.

Someone said to me,’ isnt it hard coming back from a big overseas trip, and coming home to the ‘same old, same old’ routine?’

I replied, NO WAY, this made the return home the most incredible experience ever- it is totally unique in the whole world.

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Posted in Guardian Angels, Taggers | 8 Comments »

Recommended reading

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Mandy lent me Anna Zilborg’s informative and moving book Knitting For Anarchists. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces during my morning commute (and yes, getting strange looks from other people who read the title – time to knit a book cozy). I really love her advice on becoming attune to choosing colour:

Open your eyes. I know that sounds unnecessary, simple-minded, even offensive, but it is the best advice I was ever given. I was not aware that I didn’t look at color, that I only saw colour attached to something else, like trees or flowers or sky[....] If you pick an iris and think about wearing it, you’ll find you have a wild color combination in front of you.

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Posted in Book, Colour, Guardian Angels | 3 Comments »

How long will they last?

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

Bike rack

Bike rack 2

Bike rack 3

Last month, Mandy and I hit Vancouver with some tags that she had made. These tags were left on a very busy intersection of downtown – sandwiched between the art gallery, the financial district, and some of the city’s ritzier hotels.

In addition to the constant traffic, this piece is informally known as bike courier corner. Couriers from all of the major courier companies hang out here and chat on the sidewalk between shifts. When we were tagging, we decided that if the bike couriers liked our tags, they would probably be well protected.

We’ve been checking them out from time to time – two weeks ago they had fallen down the racks and were crumpled between the bike rack and the sidewalk, but yesterday someone had reinstated the tags in their original places. It is nice to know that someone out there is taking watch and care of our tags. That’s the fascinating thing about yarn bombing, once you leave a tag – it is out of your hands. You no longer own it – the world owns it.

In other news, hot pink was taken a few hours after placement. Where this tag went, we will probably never know.

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Posted in Guardian Angels, Lifespan, Yarn Bombing | 1 Comment »