L.A. Beat

 Yarn bombing is all about beautifying drab, grey, concrete urban spaces and maybe even bringing smiles to a few faces.
While Lethbridge resident Jo-Ann Matvichuk can’t take the credit for beginning the phenomenon known as “Yarn Bombing,” “guerilla knitting,” or “yarn storming,” she can take at least partial credit for “International Yarn Bombing Day,” which took place around the globe, June 11. Locally it was among the highlights of the Lethbridge Craft Jamboree a series of activities surrounding the Lethbridge crafts and arts scene.
 But what is yarn bombing?
“It’s just being creative. It’s not difficult to do. Because living in an urban centre, there are a lot of drab, grey concrete spaces. We want to make them more colourful,”  she said adding she discovered yarn bombing through a Facebook group and various blogs from other bombers.

Basically participants knit or crochet items to dress up things like chain link fences, tree tops, abandoned buildings, bus shelters, traffic light poles and buttons with hand knitted cozies, skirts, and even hand knitted monster feet to place around light poles
“ I stared small with a bunch of little two inch ladybugs which I put on a display of artificial flowers at Michaels. I just left them there and took a picture of them,” she said adding that was a year ago.
Photography is an important element of yarn bombing as the results go on a variety of websites including her blog http://www.purlgurls.blogspot.com/.

 She expanded to knitting a colourful seat cover for one of the downtown bus stops.

“It stayed there for a month, so that shows people must have appreciated it,” she continued.
 On Saturday, she and a group of friends yarn bombed a variety of locations including a chain link fence near her son’s school, the Chinese National building downtown and a lot more. She has since done about 20 yarn bombing projects.

 Her biggest work was seen just this past Sunday, coincidentally, right after International yarn bombing day on the reality show “Wipeout Canada,” which was filmed in Argentina.

“I was a competitor on the show. Every contestant has a character and my character was called the “knitting ninja.” To make a long story short, they called me on my shit, so I  knitted a cozy for one of those big red bowls. It’s probably six by eight feet around,” she said adding she wanted to put it on the bowl herself, but due to liability issues, the show’s organizers got professional divers to do it.
Her family is supportive of her yarn bombing activities.

 

“My husband sometimes raises his eyebrow about it, but realizes how much I enjoy it, but my eldest son Jarius is my  substitute helper, when my posse can’t make it. My youngest Jobe, doesn’t quite understand it,” she continued.
 While yarn bombing requires a lot of preparation to create the works, there is also an adrenaline rush  from doing it.
“If I can get a smile out of people because of it, then I’m happy,” she said.
“I think it’s the creativity and the bizarre colours transforming  otherwise grey and drab urban landscapes,” she said deciding what  she enjoys most about it.

She said it surprisingly wasn’t tough to co-ordinate the world wide event thanks to the magic of social media. Bombers will follow blogs like Matvichuk’s who will in turn follow their followers as well as inadvertently through sites like ravelry.com, where knitting and crochet enthusiasts gather to exchange patterns and ideas, then the news spreads by word of mouth through the world wide web.
“I had a bout of insomnia and was talking to a friend online and asked her what if we were to all put one day aside and do this. So I started a Facebook group. I remember how excited I was when when it hit 100 likes, now there are close 3,000,” she said.
 A friend in Austin is going to post films and photos of the activities.

“It is really popular in Europe, especially Germany and it is big in Canada and the United States,” she said.
“We have people half way across the world taking part in Australia and New Zealand involved. And they will be done by the time we start, so we won’t have to wait until Sunday to see what they did. So I’m very excited about that. We even have people in Israel and Egypt where you just don’t do something like this,” she enthused.

 Yet she is a recent recruit to the art of knitting and crocheting.
“My mom used to do it. But I wasn’t interested. I grew up on a farm in Northern Alberta and was more interested in being outside helping my dad,” she said adding she rediscovered it abut eight years ago.