![]() Sayeg wrapped all the heating ducts at the Brooklyn offices of .Ĭompanies seem to be attracted to the retro handcrafted cheeriness of yarn. Sayeg to knit covers for 69 parking meters, and Insight, an Australian company that sells surfing clothing, which has an ad featuring a scantly clad woman riding a yarn-covered scooter. Clients have included the Montague Street Business Improvement District in Brooklyn, which paid Ms. Sayeg has so much work that she closed her shop in 2009, moved to Austin and turned her hobby into a full-time job. The makers of the Smart car flew her to Rome to wrap a car in what looked like 1970s-inspired throw blankets, and Mini Cooper recently commissioned a similar ad. Toyota hired her to knit a Prius a Christmas sweater last year for a promotional video. Sayeg as much as $20,000 to wrap their wares in yarn. ![]() Still, yarn bombing seems to be having its moment in pop culture. “Ma’am,” she recalled him saying, “step away with the knitting.” ![]() A security guard wearing a bulletproof vest approached her, she said, and demanded that she stop immediately. Prain once tried to yarn bomb a sign post in Washington, in front of F.B.I. And in the few instances when they are stopped, yarn bombers say, the police are more likely to laugh at them than issue a summons. Yarn bombers say they rarely have run-ins with the law. Whether yarn bombing is the work of artists or glorified knitters, the view of law enforcement is clear: it is considered vandalism or littering. Not everyone’s work deserves to be in public.” ![]() The street is an extension of the gallery. “Do you want to see that work in the galleries? No. “Lots of people have aunts or grandmas who paint,” she said. Within a few years, she had tagged dozens of lampposts and stop signs and assembled a crew of fellow yarn bombers she called Knitta Please. Next, she knitted what looked like a leg warmer for a stop sign down the street from there she slowly infiltrated Houston with her stitchery. “People got out of their cars just to come look at it,” she said. Passers-by loved it, stopping to admire her handiwork. On a lark, she knitted a blue-and-pink cozy for the shop’s door handle, a piece she now calls “alpha.” By her recollection, it started on a slow day in 2005 at Raye, her quirky boutique in Houston. Many of these people also reached out to Magda Sayeg, a 37-year-old Texan who is considered by many to be the mother of yarn bombing. Three film crews contacted her about making yarn bombing documentaries, and several graduate students e-mailed her about writing theses on the subject. The last month has been particularly busy ever since a Canadian knitter declared June 11 International Yarn Bombing Day on Facebook. Prain said, she has been getting dozens of e-mails a week from yarn bombers from as far away as Russia, Morocco and Iran. It is part coffee-table book, with color photographs of creative bombs, and part tutorial, with tips like wearing “ninja” black to avoid capture. ![]() Sometimes called grandma graffiti, the movement got a boost, and a manifesto, in 2009 with the publication of the book “Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti,” by Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, knitters from Vancouver, Canada. To record their ephemeral works (the fragile pieces begin to fray within weeks), yarn bombers photograph and videotape their creations and upload them to blogs, social networks and Web sites for all the world to see. And in Melbourne, Australia, a woman known as Bali conjures up cozies for bike racks and bus stops. In London, Knit the City has “yarnstormed” fountains and fences. Seattle has the YarnCore collective (“Hardcore Chicks With Sharp Sticks”) and Stockholm has the knit crew Masquerade. In Denver, a group called Ladies Fancywork Society has crocheted tree trunks, park benches and public telephones. In Paris, a yarn culprit has filled sidewalk cracks with colorful knots of yarn. It is a global phenomenon, with yarn bombers taking their brightly colored fuzzy work to Europe, Asia and beyond. Hydrants, lampposts, mailboxes, bicycles, cars - even objects as big as buses and bridges - have all been bombed in recent years, ever so softly and usually at night. Yarn bombing takes that most matronly craft (knitting) and that most maternal of gestures (wrapping something cold in a warm blanket) and transfers it to the concrete and steel wilds of the urban streetscape. ![]()
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