Yarnbombing

How knitting became an urban art form

Discover the growing craft trend known as yarnbombing or graffiti knitting. By Olivia Gordon

Surreal as it is, it's getting more and more common to find Britain's streets covered in knitting! Recent months have seen colourful knitting festooned over everything from a London phone box to a bridge in Scotland to a Manchester shed to statues, bus shelters and lampposts across the nation. The people behind this yarn graffiti call themselves yarn bombers or yarn stormers, and anyone can get involved.

So what's it all about?

It's about making art, reclaiming city streets, being silly and having fun. Yarn bombers are knitters, crocheters and textile artists who ‘tag' depressing, grey street furniture with uplifting woolly creations. ‘We yarnstorm because we love it,' says Deadly Knitshade (www.whodunnknit.com), an anonymous 32-year-old female knitter from London who yarnstorms the city as a member of fanciful, whimsical collective, Knit the City (www.knitthecity.com).

 This group has created, among other things, a ‘phone box cosy' made of knitted patches; knitted oranges and lemons to decorate the gates of churches associated with the bells of St Clements, London; and spooky knitted skeletons and spiderwebs for a Hallowe'en installation at a disused underground station. ‘There's no agenda apart from imagination, a sense of fun and an overwhelming desire to tell stitched stories through sneaky stitching,' says the mysterious Deadly Knitshade. ‘There are no rules; it's about having your own ideas, going out and doing your thing with a sense of humour.'

When did it all begin?

No one knows exactly when people started making clothes for street furniture rather than people, but it's taken off in the US and then around the world in the last few years. One of the first and most famous yarn bombers is 36-year-old ‘guerilla knitter' Magda Sayeg from Texas in the USA (http://www.magdasayeg.com). She began by using scraps of knitting left over from her unfinished projects to decorate her neighbourhood, and it just got bigger and bigger: recent triumphs have included a crochet-covered bus in Mexico, and tagging the Great Wall of China with knitting. It's about taking knitting out of the home, she explains.

‘My purpose is to prompt thought about our urban landscapes. There's humour in anthropomorphising a lamppost with an argyle sweater in February, but it also starts conversations about art vs. craft, about art in public spaces, about people's expectations of traditionally domestic crafts. My purpose is to get people thinking, but also to put smiles on faces.'

Deadly Knitshade founded her collective last year. Having learned to knit a few years ago, when she heard about yarn storming, she saw it as a natural progression from knitting scarves and jumpers, which she now sees as rather boring. ‘Yarn storming is knitting as art - it's really different and fun and I enjoy the creative challenge,' she explains. ‘It can make people's day to see the knitting and you can highlight things you want people to look at. There's also the social aspect and teamwork of working together with others.'

How does it work?

Deadly Nightshade explains that her collective start out with a big vision for each project - a 15-foot knitted spiderweb for instance or a set of knitted creatures that will tell a story when placed in a location. They go out and measure the location to be covered in knitting, and create templates. The yarn stormers then get to work, often spending every evening knitting their share as the deadline for the street decoration looms.

They use cheap colourful acrylic yarn, often donated from others' stashes or bought on eBay. ‘You can go crazy with yarn you wouldn't be seen dead in if you were making clothes - like scratchy bouclés,' says Knitshade. As crafters, they take pleasure in experimenting with colours, textures and skills: ‘Our knitting gets more and more complicated and we learn new techniques every day, like mixing in other fabrics or even LED lights. We're bringing in other elements like embroidery now too and really crafting; it's moved on from simply covering objects in knitting. '

Finally, they drape their work all over the chosen location, take photos and stand back to watch as the public do double takes and chuckle in amusement. ‘One our work has left our hands, it's interesting to see how long it lasts,' Knitshade says. ‘People take a fancy to it and children usually take pieces of it home within just a few hours. We compete to see whose work gets stolen first!' They put labels on their work which ask those who take the knitting to ‘confess' the theft on their website, though it's rare that anyone has the gumption to do so. But, hard as it is for knitters who are used to making cherished garments to understand, these artists don't mind that passersby pocket the knits eventually or street cleaners throw them away - ‘it's nice they're so wanted, and if they were left on display forever they'd get rained on and ruined anyway,' Knitshade says.

Is there a purpose?

‘It's art for art's sake, just in the same way other arts work. People don't generally expect charities or causes to benefit directly from art. I don't see why knitted art might be different,' says Knitshade. But just as any kind of art can draw attention to causes or charities, there's nothing to stop yarnbombers using their work to make a statement.

One prominent British yarn bomber who's done just that is 29-year old artist Rachael Elwell, from Salford, who runs a social network for knit artists (subversiveyarn.ning.com). Her ArtYarn group (www.artyarn.org) tagged street furniture in Liverpool city centre with pieces of knitting made from shredded recycled plastic carrier bags to bring attention to the amount of waste that shopping bags produce.

Members of ArtYarn made a series of visits to the streets of Liverpool to collect discarded plastic carrier bags from public spaces and inner city wasteland areas. Each bag found and retrieved from a site in Liverpool city centre was documented and mapped. Once a sufficient amount of bags were collected, the found bags were then cleaned and shredded to form a recycled yarn, out of which new art works were made by hand knitting. By referring back to the mapping document created on retrieval of the found plastic carrier bags, ArtYarn replaced the bags, in knitted form, into the environments they were found and in those areas of the city which had the highest volume of plastic carrier bag littering and waste, to make their point. 

‘There are many reasons to do knit graffiti,' says Canadian Leanne Prain, co-author with Mandy Moore of the bible of yarn graffiti, 'Yarnbombing' (Arsenal Pulp Press, £13.99) and co-founder of leading global yarn graffiti bloghttp://yarnbombing.com.  ‘For some people it is simply a form of self expression; others see it as a defiant, political act. Many feminists like the fact that street art, which has traditionally viewed as a 'male' art, is now being done with the materials that have traditionally been used by women. Some people that it is a positive form of graffiti. Overall, no matter what your political affiliation, I would say that everyone that we talk to, no matter what their background, says that yarn bombing brings a sense a joy - to themselves and others.'

She adds: ‘We live in a world that has been covered with 'sameness' - I can eat in the same fast food restaurant in Canada as you can in the UK. We can buy the same shirt from the Gap. Handcraft items cannot be duplicated the same way - yarn bombing is a way of putting your mark on the place where you live, or travel. It is a way of putting a unique signature on the world. Author Betsy Greer called yarn bombing "love letters to your city".

How can I get involved?

Just go out and do it, or get your knitting group to join you, advises Knitshade. If you want to connect with other yarn stormers, they're often easy to contact through their websites and blogs. If you want to highlight a cause through yarn storming, get in touch with the charity or organisation and suggest it.

And unlike other forms of graffiti, yarn doesn't deface or damage property, so don't worry about getting into trouble! ‘Once I was stopped by a cop in New York City, but as soon as he saw that I wasn't using spray paint he just chuckled and went on his way,' remembers Magda. When yarn storming in London's Parliament Square, the Knit the City crew were served a 'stop and search' notice by the police. ‘The fact that it was 'craft' disarmed them somewhat,' says Knitshade. ‘They allowed us to continue and one of them took a photo of the phonebox to send to his wife. It's much less intrusive than some street art and it's all utterly removable.'

Yarnbombing: our pick of the best

Knitted graffiti, also known as yarnbombing, yarnstorming or guerilla knitting, is the 

art of using items handmade from yarn to create street art. Here's our gallery of 

some of the cleverest, weirdest and most daring British yarnstorms of the last year.

 By Olivia Gordon.

Source: http://www.allaboutyou.com