This intriguing yarn-bomb replicates a multitude of Olympic sports, cast in a 50ft-long piece in knitting. Whoever you are mystery crafter, I grant you the keys-to-the-City-of-Yarn-Bombing for March. You are amazing!

Mary Bennett was kind enough to send me these images from the pier:

Other links of note:

My Modern Met has a nice collection of images from Magda Sayeg of Knitta. The first image of the stairs is just stunning: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/magda-sayeg-knitta-please-yarn-bombing-street-art

Knitting a revolution – a friend send me this video about activists who are crafting a revolution in Syria. Really interesting story but it is unfortunate that they didn’t fact-check knitting vs crochet. Despite the slip-up, it is a fascinating story and deserves a watch: http://www.jpost.com/VideoArticles/Video/Article.aspx?id=260343

Joann spotted these statues at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby (Canada) today and send these photos of the adorned “At the Beach” statue today:

Margaret send this image from last year’s Austin Limits Festival:

Lois sent me this image from Ogden Park:

She says: ‘Here is a little story of my brush with yarn bombing. In June of this year I met a woman called Patricia on the VIA train as we travelled from Vancouver to Edmonton… Anyway, this woman was knitting a curious item that would be installed on a bridge near her home in Southern California the same day, that she would arrive back home a couple of weeks from our meeting. That was my introduction to this happen’ thing. In July I was driving through to Jasper Park (I spent too much time in Northern Alberta this summer) and stopped at a viewing place in Mt Robson Park. Well! wasn’t I surprised to see a knit graffiti item on one of the support of the view’s sign.

Then when at Ogden Point in Victoria I found two more of these creations very near to one another. This is as much fun as geocaching seems to be. I’m about to give that a try. Maybe knit bombing sites need to be geo mapped, what do you think?

NIkki sent me a photo of her very first yarn bomb, and it is so pretty! She says:

‘I’ve wanted to yarn bomb something for ages, problem was working up the courage. Recently, I was teaching myself entrelac. As I knitted up my first square while visiting my grandmother she asked me what I planned to do with it. “I dunno,” I said, “Probably tie it to a tree or something.” She either didn’t hear me or thought I’d gone slightly round the twist because she didn’t question it. Here it is.’

And, other notable news of late:

A knitting project to cover Clitheroe Castle.

A ‘yarn bombing and geek’ exhibit at Lafayette College.

Val has created the amazing LEDFlower project which is yarn bombing project where she makes up kits of LED lights and yarn to send to knitters all over the world. The LEDFlower project combines social networking, regular old mail, and google maps to share tiny episodes of yarn bombing fun internationally and put them on a map. What an incredible idea! I wish I’d thought of this first.

Bali Twilight Taggers, in Melbourne Australia, are creating a public installation and running a series of workshops.

She says: ‘In January we are embarking on our biggest project to date. We will be covering all 12 trees in City Square [Cnr Collins and Swanston Streets, Melbourne] with yarn to promote summer in the city and also to bring more coverage of crafts in Victoria. The yarn bombing installation date is Saturday Jan 21 and on Sunday Jan 22 we will hold learn to crochet and knit workshops. We estimate that we will remove it one month later. We have close to $20,000 of sponsorship [mainly in yarn] [we were given $15,000 in yarn from Yarn Barn!!] for the project so it’s a big deal. Anyone wanting to help us out must sign up to the Yarn Corner facebook group [or if they don't have facebook then they can email me] and they can pick up their yarn from myself. If they are not local to Melbourne they can still join in but will have to pay for postage themselves or use their own yarn.

And in other news, I have scored a partnership between Yarn Corner and Spotlight [the biggest craft department stores in Australia] for 2012. We will be hosting two events for Spotlight. One in February will be to quietly open their new 2012 yarn lines. And a larger event in June 2012 will be to open their winter yarn season. We will be attempting two Guinness World Record attempts for yarn bombing [details still to be determined]. So it looks like 2012 will be a stellar year for Yarn Corner and yarn bombing.’

January Round-up: Part 2 will be coming soon!

This morning Mandy and I met up with other fellow knitters to cozy up a forgotten statue on Vancouver’s seawall. Here are some pics:

Thanks to Olga, Kat, Valerie, April, Phillip, Mandy, Pippa, Peggy, Cynara, Linda, Judie, Annie, Megan, Zak, and everyone else who helped today and with knitting and crocheting squares.

More posts to come as soon as my computer problems are sorted!

Tell me about yourself.

I am 44 years old and I live in Lethbridge Alberta Canada

What inspired International Yarn Bombing Day?
I was having some insomnia and was wide awake at three am back in February of this year and I browsing Facebook looking for Yarnbombing pages. With each click I found more and more and they were from all over the place then I wandered over to ravelry.com and did the same in the yarnbomb groups there. That was when I realized that if I could reach out to this vastly growing community that we could all come together and do its thing some of us call graffiti and some call it art all at the same time on one day and that’s when the idea was born. I do my best thinking at 3 am you know. So the next morning I started building the page and would just share my link on Facebook pages and then a while later I started the group on Ravelry.

How did you learn to knit?
My mother taught me the basics when I was a young girl but I was never really interested was more interested in being outside and then when I was pregnant with my first son I got the itch and joined a small group through a friend of mine and the Guru of the group taught me what I needed to know which was how to read a pattern she was also the one who started teaching me how to crochet but I gave up on that soon and then my friend Amy who is one of the Purl Gurls really helped me learn but I still consider myself a beginner.

When did you start yarn bombing?
I started yarnbombing about a year ago now and I started doing it because I liked the things I saw like the Yarn Bombing book it was right up my alley adventurous and quirky and artsy all at the same time.

What will you do being on June 11th?
I will be doing some small installations on June 11th as my posse the Purl Gurls are unable to help but no matter how small I just hope they make someone smile.

Do you have any advice for your fellow yarn bombers?
My advice to those Yarn Bombing on June 11th is enjoy what you’re doing enjoy the thrill have fun spread the yarn love as I would say and above all else be safe if you’re doing it at night or on your own. And be proud of the community that we belong to.

Wise words Joann! Thanks for taking the time to be interviewed. You have inspired a lot of people to participate in the knitted arts this weekend.
—-

For June 11th, I will be working with a small group of Vancouver-based knitters to bomb a local statue and will be blogging all day – posting whatever comes to me in the form of photos and stories. If you want to send me something, please ensure that the files are under 1MB, and you tell me where the yarn bombing was and who to credit and link back to for the photograph. Items can be sent to me at leanne (AT) yarn bombing (DOT) come.

Rumor has it that this week’s TIME magazine has a yarn bombing story in it, so you may want to pick up a copy.

And, there is a documentary team who is also seeking images of whatever you do on June 11th. Here is their official call:
WE WANT YOUR IYBD FOOTAGE! My crew and I can only be in one place at a time, but we want to gather as much footage as possible for an elaborate montage of bombers around the world. If you plan on taking part of any project and plan to have video, pictures, or any other documentation, please send it to us. This is an imparitive part of the film.

Here’s how it works:

- You can upload any materials you have to www.wetransfer.com (up to 2 GB) or www.yourfilelink.com (up to 5GB).
-When upload is complete it will give a link to the file.
-Email this link to freelancelot002@gmail.com.

PLEASE NOTE that even though you retain ownership of all media uploaded, by submitting materials you give the filmmakers full permission to use the media in the film, without compensation. Though we can not pay you for your footage, credit will be given for the work done in the end credits of the film.

Again, this is a call to ANYONE doing some sort of fiber art project on this day. This is your chance to feature your work to the world! Please help us get the word out to all the groups, big and small. http://yarngraffitidocumentary.blogspot.com/2011/06/give-us-your-international-yarn-bombing.html

I’m really excited to see what comes from all this.

Thanks and keep crafting!

Best Regards,
-Sarah

It has been a while since I’ve posted an interview on yarnbombing.com, and I’m glad that this is such a good one. Based in Sammamish, Washington; Suzanne and Beth go by the moniker ’2fibrefriends’. As moms who ‘long for something more’, they are covering their local area haunts in fibre and Dr. Seuss-like whimsy.

I asked them the usual questions, and they came up with some great, unusual responses:

Tell me about yourself

We are/have been inspired by other yarn bombers … we both took the University of Washington’s Certificate of Fiber Arts program for the 2009/10 year … our first class found us at the UW book store and the book that jumped off the shelves was “Yarn Bombing—The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti” (you may be familiar with this book) … we started small but one thing led to another … and before we knew it, we were covering 20 foot stumps in our fair city with 68,000 yards of yarn or 38.6 miles.

A Fibre Bombing of the Famous Fremont Troll in Seattle. Photo by Beth Newfeld.

Do you knit or crochet? Are you sneaky when you tag?
We both knit and crochet. We like to use reclaimed yarn—we are frequent shoppers at Value Village and we don’t hesitate to unravel an afghan for our purposes. We like to tag trees, light posts, chairs at Starbucks, etc. Sometimes we work big and sometimes we work small and discreet.

We tend to tag in broad daylight and we did seek permission from our city for the tree sock installations.

Our families do know about our proclivity to yarn bomb and we quite often make them culpable … they’ve knit panels together, crocheted flower centers, installed with us.

Have we ever been caught? We asked permission from the city for our large tree sock installations but, for other projects, no we have not been caught.

Photo courtesy of Jeff Newfeld

Any words of wisdom for Yarn-Bombing readers?

Why not? We often get asked “why” … so “why not”? If something we do brings a little magic or whimsy to someone’s day, hurrah.

Thanks Beth and Suzanne for taking the time to answer my questions! I look forward to seeking out your work next time I visit Seattle!

To see Beth and Suzanne in action, check out their photo sets on Flickr.

Calgary
Congrats to the Calgary Art Bomber and the Happy Hookers for the successful installation of the traffic barrier project this week:

Image courtesy of The Calgary Art Bomber

Downtown Calgary should be looking a lot brighter!

British Columbia
Further west, yarn bombing has appeared in the Ski Resort of SunPeaks, BC:

yarn bombing tree

California
Down south (from my perspective in Vancouver), the ever intrepid Streetcolor has come up with some beautiful wrapped poles:

Photos courtesy of Streetcolor.

Each of these knit pieces are 30 feet long!

Streetcolor has been decorating museum sites lately – and has been writing some very interesting blog posts. If you haven’t had a chance to visit her blog lately, I would recommend it. And, if you are new to yarn bombing, do not miss her advice for novice yarn bombers.

Germany
Further afield, there has been more yarn bombing in Berlin! This video, sent to me by Miraché, makes me extremely happy: Yarn Bombing in Berlin

She says: ‘A group of Guerilla Knitters which I am part of have recently (31 January to be precise) stormed the U1 in Berlin disguised with knitted beards and armed with knitted cozies, to beautify and soften the harsh interior of the everyday world of commuters. After 3 months of preparation with my Stitch N Bitch group, it took us just an hour to install, and the carriage stayed in circulation until around 15:00, when the BVG security unfortunately cut it all to pieces. Despite making those few employees miserable by giving them extra work, I think we cheered up a fair amount of weary travellers on a gloomy January day!’

I agree – I love the smile on the bewildered passenger’s face in the first minute of the video. See more photos of the installation here.

Morocco
Carole has written to tell me that she has completed her first yarn bombing – in Morocco! This little tag was placed on a telephone in the tiny town of Tiznit. It’s the first time that Carole has knitted in 20 years – I think that the tag is a good return to the knit. Congrats Carole!

Chile
While the earthquake in Japan has been on the forefront of my mind lately as the country has a special kinship with the area of Canada that I live in – Marina has reminded me that Chile is also recovering from the effects of their own natural disaster. In late February, she decorated a building in Santiago which had been torn apart by an 8.8 earthquake to be a sign of hope for renewal and to bring attention to an apartment that was once a home to many people: http://www.revesderecho.com/2011/02/28/yarnbombing-27f/

Moscow
From warm to cold, there has also been some winter yarn bombing in Moscow. This photo was sent in by Наталья Кириллова:

I can’t read Russian, but from what I can tell from their blog – they got up to some woolly madness: http://lunteg.livejournal.com/132994.html Anyone know this statue? It’s time to break out the Google Translate.

Whew – that’s not all, but it is all I’m going to put in this post. Next time – an interview with two artist working with fibre in Seattle!

Looking to do some yarn bombing next weekend? If you are close to Daytona Beach, Florida, there will be a community event for fiber enthusiasts:

Saturday, April 9 10 to 3 pm
Peabody Auditorium in Daytona Beach, Florida, USA.

Yarn Bombing by local guerrilla girls – bring your needles and yarn, bring your friends, and join in the fun. Also Sister City poets are participating with a tug ‘o war poetry contest and groups of knitters are coming in from around the area. It’s a free art installation gig! Laughter provided free of charge.

If you live in the Vancouver area, the tree will be decorated until the first of March. It is located in the back alley of Historic Joy Kogawa House at 1450 West 64th Avenue.

Photos by Jeff Christenson.

A comprehensive set of photos of the day can be seen through photographer Lydia Nagai’s flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lydianagai/sets/72157626101621321

I have also written a guest post for Arsenal Pulp Press about the day which should be posted on their blog soon, and April (April’s Tender Nest) and Monica (
Monica Miller) who attended the event, have both written blog posts about their experience helping us decorate the tree.

Thanks again to everyone who participated – whether it be by decorating or sending in their blossoms. It was a beautiful, awe-inspiring day.

And of course, while our heads have been involved in all things cherry blossom, the world of knit graffiti never sleeps. My in-box is so chock full of good stuff that I’m having a hard time keeping up. If you’ve sent me an email, and I haven’t gotten back to you, I promise another project round-up very soon.

In the meantime, there have been a ton of wonderful large-scale projects that you need to check out immediately, including:

Magda Sayeg’s Stunning 99 Trees in Austin.

Juliana’s charming yarn bombed pot holes in Paris.

And, the yarn bombing of the Blue Line in Philly.

Delighted.

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.

Happy Holidays to you and yours! Yarn Bombing will be back with new posts and projects in 2011.

Andrew, a local yarn bomber here in Vancouver, BC, contacted us with a few picture of his recent bright orange tags!

I’ve been crocheting for about 5 years now and sewing for the past year. I totally support the arts and am going to be yarn bombing all over Vancouver, so hopefully you can spot some of my bombs, mainly going to be downtown and on public transit. I’m going to only be rocking a hot orange yarn for my signature to make them stand out, and for orange being my favourite color, ha ha. Just on the way downtown to the library today I did 3 bombs, 2 mini ones on the bus and Skytrain, and I’m in the works on covering a bench arm rest at the library. Here are some shots!!

We appreciate his daring -he’s managed to tag public transit here several times, which is no small feat, as it is heavily patrolled during hockey season. And his work has been spotted all over the Vancouver Transit System – we’ve been getting many reports of sightings.

Andrew was kind enough to take some time out from tagging to answer some questions for us. Some details have been changed to protect his identity:

Tell us about yourself. What’s your name (or code name)? Where do you live in? How old are you? What’s your day job?

Hello all you yarn-bombers out there. My name’s Andrew and I am from Vancouver, Canada. I’m 20 and a full-time business student. I like to think of my employment as crocheting
and sewing. I like to call it a little side project, but I’m in the works of starting up a custom skimboard bag company since all I do, breath, and dream about is skimboarding. I also sell toques* and have
been crocheting for 5 years.

How did you get into textile graffiti?

Funny enough, a friend showed me some pictures of knit/crochet graffiti a while back and didn’t think much of it. After doing a custom crochet project with Complex (graffiti associated) , which was dubbed “The Fray Project”, he told me yarn-bombing was happening right here in Vancouver. I couldn’t believe it and had to get in on the action. I just started yarn-bombing, doing little tags on transit, and covering an arm on a bench at our DT public library, which is still there haha. I mainly do it alone since I don’t know any other yarn-bombers, and am usually on the go.

I’m trying to get a few friends together and do some big missions and get creative, but so far it’s been all talk and no walk.

Where do you create your tags?

I do my tags on the spot in broad daylight, full view for bystanders to see. Typically they are small, going as fast as I can for 15mins on a bus or skytrain with a 7mm hook around a pole isn’t that easy I found out. I plan to only use red-heart orange yarn, as my signature color, since I’m a red-head. I plan on doing some big pieces soon, so watch out for those orange Yarn-Bombs!

I scope out my spot, making sure no authority is present, or anyone who I think would intervene and get to it. I crochet only. I plan on tagging a lot of skytrain and bus poles, just to jazz them up and bring some life to their cold hard surfaces.

I tag whenever I feel the need to crochet or whenever I feel like doing it, lately school has been running my life so I try to do it once in a while.

How do you get your inspiration for tags?

I love seeing what other people do on this blog. I would even be more stoked if I saw some yarn-bomb’s in my city.

What is your craziest yarn graffiti fantasy?

To yarn-bomb a cop’s gun handle while it’s right in its holster!

Does your family know you do this? Do your co-workers know?

Yes, I’ve informed them and my mom think’s its rad. I don’t have any co-workers but I’m sure they would want in no doubt.

What do you say when people ask you what you are knitting?

First of all, I tell them it’s crocheting, big difference. Secondly, I tell them I’m making art. If they continue talking, I do the head nod until they stop since they usually take away time from my precious yarn-bombing.

Have you ever been caught in the act yarn-bombing? What did you do?

Not yet. But if I was, I’d run I think….

Do you document your work? Do you photograph it or keep a blog?

I always try to take photos of all my yarn-bombs. I just usually upload them to Facebook to my “sweatshop” album where I do all my craft. Keep up the yarn-bombing everyone, especially all you Vancourites!

Thanks Andrew – for answering our questions. We’ll be keeping an eye out for your bright orange tags as we move around the city!

*If you are interested in sporting some of Andrew’s hand crocheted work; he sells his toques at Complex, El Kartel, and
Headquarter in Downtown Vancouver.