Silly Little Country

Yarn Bombing - People are so Great

h/t Tim Worstall
Anarchy has its small benefits.

"Kooky and eccentric" is also a good description of Magda Sayeg, the Texas woman credited with starting the yarn bombing movement. Sayeg was managing a clothes shop in 2005 when she was struck by the ugliness of its steel-and-concrete surroundings. Overwhelmed by "a selfish desire to add colour to my world", she knitted her shop a door handle. Then she knitted a sheath for the stop-sign pole across the road. "People got out of their cars and took photos in front of it," she recalls. Seduced by these positive reactions, she began splattering bits of knitting across the world: over parking meters in Brooklyn, over a bus in Mexico, most recently over the gun carried by an 8m-high statue of a soldier in Bali, neutering its violence.

Texas. That fits beautifully, though her reach is worldwide.
And then comes the downfall.

This might explain the increasing desire of councils and art institutions to commission yarn bombers to create official works of art. In August, Belfast was comprehensively yarn bombed at the instigation of Craft Northern Ireland, a government-backed organisation supporting the craft industry. Sayeg has been invited by cities across the US to liven up their public spaces, and O'Farrell is finding it increasingly difficult to separate her guerilla activities from the teaching and charity events she is engaged in as part of her day job, managing the knitting community, Stitch London.

Great! Let's get the David Millers and the "arts institutions" engaged to ruin a perfectly sensible activity.
S^&t. Oh well, another good idea gone seriously bad.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:05 AM