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Knit a whole new world

Is yarn bombing the bomb-diggity?

By Natalie Serafini

ou’re probably familiar with
¥{ ssa underground

art form that appears on
everything from bridges and
buildings, to desks. It’s been
around for decades now, and has
led to some interesting offshoots:
for example, the rise of guerrilla
gardening, which is gardening on
someone else’s property without
permission. I was surprised
enough when I heard about
guerrilla gardening (it seemed
both epically cool and feebly
illicit) but it’s nothing compared
to what I recently stumbled
across on Facebook. Get ready to
acquaint yourself with the bad-ass
grandmother of the graffiti world:
yarn bombing.

Yarn bombing, or crochet/ knit
graffiti, is knitting decorations for
someone else’s property without
permission. With their mission of
“brightening up the world,” yarn
bombers knit over and around
objects, leaving the results for
others to enjoy. The possibilities are
endless: people have yarn bombed
cars, bikes, trees, fruit, and even
turtles. It’s the graffiti alternative
for those who want to knit their
way to a more beautiful world.

There’s a surprisingly
large support base for this yarn
phenomenon, coming in the form
of numerous websites and forums
on which to post pictures of your
knit-one-purl-two’s. There is also
a book titled Yarn Bombing: The
art of crochet and knit graffiti by
Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain,
which offers a starting point for
newbies. Yarn bombing is also
a community, a cause, and an
interest on Facebook. It even has an
internationally celebrated day and
can be found in Australia, Austria,
Montreal, and Los Angeles among
other places.

    

I had intended to try out yarn
bombing in some form or another.
Lacking the supplies to knit for
myself, I decided to take to the
streets with a wool sweater, but
this didn’t quite pan out. I have
a veritable cornucopia of excuses
for not attempting a yarn bombing
session: I had neither the time nor
the knitting needles. I tried knitting
when I was younger and the results
hovered around horrendous.
Besides, I would feel pretty self-
conscious publicly affixing yarn to
a tree.

Despite my inexperience, I
can still offer some advice if knit
graffiti appeals to you as a pastime.
If you’re new to yarn bombing, I
would suggest you start off small—
after all, you wouldn’t want to
embarrass yourself with shoddy
knitting! Don’t go yarn bombing
cars, trees, or telephone booths
right away, but rather start off with
a little doorknob cozy, or a railing
scarf. You can always move on to
bigger and better things! Keep in
mind, as well, that this is not the
sort of pastime that can be done
willy-nilly: quality knit graffiti
requires preparation and planning
time.

Overall, yarn bombing remains
a bizarre activity that I'll probably
push myself to try one of these
days. I know I'll be embarrassed,
and the thought of making another
horrible scarf is enough to make
anyone cringe, especially if their
property was adorned with said
scarf. Even so, I smiled at every
single yarn bombing picture I saw
and would be just as amused to see
such creations in person (or should
I say, “in wool?”) As much as I like
to pretend that I’m bad-ass (“Look,
look! I have a piercing! I’m totally
edgy!”) it’s pretty safe to say the
most criminal thing I'll ever do is
yarn bomb a rock.

 

Opinions

Let’s kick some asteroid ass

Second space race should be about protecting our planet, not exploring others

Ri Se Cce Wak itis coe

By Andrew Terefenko — The
Silhouette (McMaster University)

HAMILTON (CUP) — Did you feel
it? On Nov. 8, an asteroid brushed
right by our little blue sphere in
space, giving some of us a genuine
scare. I’m not talking some dinky,
burns-up-in-our-atmosphere
asteroid we scoff at several times
a day. We almost got hit by a
400-metre-wide clump of coal and
space evil.

To put this into perspective, the
asteroid, named 2005 YU55 (rolls
right off the tongue), came closer to

 

would not be nearly enough time to
deal with it adequately.

Awesome. Not that it is
super urgent, as the chances of it
happening are slim, but slimmer
odds have prevailed—and all it
takes is one to really ruin our day.

Our planet is, as SWF executive
director Ray Williamson told the
CBC, a “sitting duck in a cosmic
shooting gallery,” and the sooner
we take steps to protect it, the
sooner we can get back to poking
each other with nuclear sticks and

comparing the size of our GDPs in
the bathroom.

“Do we want to be mocked by alien civilizations when they learn
we met the same fate as the dinosaurs—creatures that we dig up,
display and make cult classic films about?”

us than the moon does at any given
time of the year. That's a frightening
thought.

There was never any actual
threat from the astral rock, as
observatories around the world
have long predicted its arrival and
trajectory, and were given enough
data to back up the claim that
it would not directly impact us.
What the asteroid did do, though,
is remind us just how fragile our
planet is, and how Earth has little to
no defence plans in the event that
an asteroid decides not to take the
scenic route.

Prompted by the event, groups
like the Secure World Foundation
(SWF) have banded together to plan
an international strategy that would
deal with these space invaders
made of stone. The SWF has
approached the UN Office for Outer
Space Affairs, which is a completely
legitimate organization, apparently,
to inquire into their contingency
plan for the unthinkable
catastrophe. The verdict? If a
foreign space object comes at us
with no warning—for instance,
from behind the sun, which would
give us less time to predict its
movement—we are helpless. There

The next time we expect to have
such a frightening fly-by is in the
far-flung year of 2028, when we are
finally going to have those flying
cars that we were supposed to get
back in 1995. Then we can just fly
above the ruins of a charred, broken
planet, kind of like The Jetsons.

Or, we'll repeat the mistakes
of small-brained, gigantic lizards
that lived 65 million years ago.
They lived their lives in squalor
and ecstasy and paid the price
when they failed to respond to the
asteroid threat. Do we want to be
mocked by alien civilizations when
they learn we met the same fate
as the dinosaurs—creatures that
we dig up, display and make cult
classic films about?

So before those Hanna-Barbera
prophecies come to fruition, let’s
pour some of that money we don’t
have back into the space programs
we have forgotten about. Let’s
do it before they get to have the
ultimate “I told you so” moment.
Don’t forget: there is an entire belt
of roughly 1.7 million asteroids
just waiting between Mars and
Jupiter, and all it takes is a slight
gravitational disturbance to get
them to look in our direction.

"eS