Crocheting at the Library!

Calling all Adults!

Interested in learning to crochet or simply looking for a refresher course?

Join us at our Willard location the 2nd and 4th Saturday of the month

1pm to 2pm for Crochet Class.

This group enrichment class is free and yarn is provided.

You can join in at anytime.

For more information call 419-933-8564 and ask for Terri.

(Those interested in quilting keep an eye open for more information on Quilting Camp as part of our Adult Summer Reading Program coming this June!)

Crochet  is a process of creating fabric from yarn, thread, or other material strands using a crochet hook. The word is derived from the French word “crochet”, meaning hook. Hooks can be made of materials such as metals, woods or plastic and are commercially manufactured as well as produced by artisans. Crocheting, like knitting, consists of pulling loops through other loops, but additionally incorporates wrapping the working material around the hook one or more times. Crochet differs from knitting in that only one stitch is active at one time (exceptions being Tunisian crochet and Broomstick lace), stitches made with the same diameter of yarn are comparably taller, and a single crochet hook is used instead of two knitting needles. Additionally, crochet has its own system of symbols to represent stitch types.

In the past few years, a practice called yarn bombing, or the use of knitted or crocheted cloth to modify and beautify one’s (usually outdoor) surroundings, emerged in the US and spread worldwide. Yarn bombers sometimes target existing pieces of graffiti for beautification.

Yarn Bombing — Like Graffiti with Grandma Sweaters

http://bubblegumpost.com/2011/05/yarn-bombing-like-graffiti-with-grandma-sweaters/

A few handy women who decided that street art and graffiti are male dominated took matters into their own hands with “yarn bombing.”  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. 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.

It is a global phenomenon, with yarn bombers taking their brightly colored fuzzy work to Europe, Asia and beyond. In Paris, a yarn culprit has filled sidewalk cracks with colorful knots of yarn. In Denver, a group called Ladies Fancywork Society has crocheted tree trunks, park benches and public telephones. Seattle has the YarnCore collective, and Stockholm has the knit crew Masquerade. In London, Knit the City has “yarnstormed” fountains and fences. And in Melbourne, Australia, a woman known as Bali conjures up cozies for bike racks and bus stops.

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.  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 (http://yarnbombing.com). It is part coffee-table book, with color photographs of creative bombs, and part tutorial, with tips like wearing “ninja” black to avoid capture.

Since the book’s publication, Prain said, she has been getting dozens of emails a week from yarn bombers from as far away as Russia, Morocco and Iran. The last month has been particularly busy ever since a Canadian knitter declared June 11 International Yarn Bombing Day on Facebook.  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. By her recollection, it started on a slow day in 2005 at Raye, her quirky boutique in Houston. On a lark, she knitted a blue-and-pink cozy for the shop’s door handle, a piece she now calls “alpha.”

Passers-by loved it, stopping to admire her handiwork. “People got out of their cars just to come look at it,” she said.  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. 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.  Soon, Sayeg was commissioned to do larger projects. Photographs of her pieces spread online, inciting other knitters to take up the budding art form.  Not all artists who use yarn in their work are thrilled with the woolly trend.

“I don’t yarn bomb, I make art,” said Agata Oleksiak, 33, an artist in New York who has been enshrouding humans, bicycles and swimming pools in neon-colored crochet since 2003. Last Christmas Eve, Olek, as she prefers to be called, blanketed the “Charging Bull” statue near Wall Street in a pink and purple cozy, and uploaded a video of it to YouTube. “If someone calls my bull a yarn bomb, I get really upset,” she added.

Whether yarn bombing is the work of artists or glorified knitters, the view of law enforcement is clear: it is considered vandalism or littering. Still, the police seem to tolerate it. Yarn bombers say they rarely have run-ins with the law. 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.  Prain once tried to yarn bomb a sign post in Washington, in front of FBI headquarters. A security guard wearing a bulletproof vest approached her, she said, and demanded that she stop immediately.

“Ma’am,” she recalled him saying, “step away with the knitting.”  Still, yarn bombing seems to be having its moment in pop culture. Fortune 500 companies have paid Sayeg as much as $20,000 to wrap their wares in yarn. Toyota hired her to knit a Prius a Christmas sweater last year for a promotional video. 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.