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Photos found on the Internet show yarn bombs on a building on East Fourth Avenue and a handful of trees along North High Street (below).
Ravelry.com (2)
We’ve all seen the aesthetic damage caused by taggers—spray painters who relish defiling brick exteriors, freeway overpasses and the like with their unsightly graffiti.
But another vandal, perhaps the stealthiest of them all, has been hiding right under our noses: knitters.
You read it right. There’s a covert network of threaders and embroiderers in our midst, bent on defacing public property—wrapping mailboxes, streetlights and trees with little sweaters of woven yarn.
The phenomenon is known in some circles as “yarn bombing,” and it’s made its way into the capital city, as recent photos found on ravelry.com (a social media website for knitters) depict two “bombs” dropped in the Short North within the last year; several trees along North High Street and the corner of a building across from the post office on East Fourth Avenue were covered in wool.
“I definitely know of yarn bombing,” says Knitters Mercantile sales associate Kathryn Maynard. “It’s my understanding that, like other graffiti artists, it is done in secret and the people who do it use pseudonyms.”
So adept are they at blending in that knowledge of their existence eludes the Columbus police. “I’ve never heard of it,” says police spokesman Sgt. Rich Weiner. “I don’t know if it’s infiltrated the streets of Columbus.”
It turns out there is even a book on the subject, Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti, a sort of DIY manual published in 2009. One of its two authors, Leanne Prain (if that is her real name), also manages a blog, yarnbombing.com. “I’ve had a lifelong love affair with the textile arts and anarchy,” she writes in an e-mail from her home in Vancouver, British Columbia. “I also have a graphic design background. I learned about knit graffiti shortly after learning to knit and the three interests merged.”
Prain describes yarn bombing as “positive street art,” and she says she understands that most people might not get it. “Like anything offbeat, knit graffiti isn’t for everyone. Some people think it’s strange, some think it is absurd, some think it’s a waste of good wool, but many people find it fun and uplifting. . . .”
Weiner says the handling of yarn bombers would be up to the discretion of the responding officers, adding protocol would dictate that anyone caught in the act could face civil charges, although, “Let’s be honest: Is it destroying any property?” he says.
Prain says she’s had only one run-in with the law. “It was with a security guard at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C.,” she writes. “He told me . . . ‘Ma’am, walk away with the knitting.’ I obeyed.”
When most think of knitters, they likely picture elderly women in rocking chairs. “While the whole ‘knitting granny’ thing is certainly still around, you’ll find that the younger generation of knitters can be a saucy and inventive bunch,” says Maynard.
