Christmas Yarn Bombs on Rathdowne St

At the weekend I went to help some of the Yarn Corner crew wrap some trees on Rathdowne Street in red yarn and crocheted Christmas baubles. The project was commissioned by City of Yarra Council.

The trees are between Curtain St and Newry St, so pop along to see them if you can. The Christmas decorations are particularly sweet although I’m afraid I can’t take any of the credit for them.

While we were wrapping the trees, passing cyclists rang their bells, people in cars rolled down their windows to talk to us, and people passing on the street came up to take a closer look and ask us questions. Everyone was so interested and encouraging. It was lovely to see first hand the positive impact yarn bombing has on a community.

An article about the installation appeared in The Age today.

 

The Life Expectancy of a Yarn Bomb

Walking down Sydney Road last week I did a double take when a familiar looking orange, pink and blue woolly cuff caught my eye. It was the yarn bomb Grace and I put up almost a year ago, looking significantly grubbier than last time I saw it.

Before: February 2012

After: November 2012

I hadn’t really given much thought to the life expectancy of a yarn bomb before. I think I assumed that you put them up and left them, and they brought sunshine into people’s lives forever and ever after that. But no. They get bleached by the sun, matted by the rain and dusty from passing traffic.

We went back with a pair of scissors yesterday and cut it down, like the socially responsible yarn bombers that we are.

I Love Libraries

Some weeks ago I went to Brunswick Library looking for Spike Milligan’s Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (it was recommended to me by some members of my non-fiction writers’ group in Edinburgh). The book should have been in the stacks but when a librarian went down to check, he couldn’t find it.

“It’s really unusual for a book to go missing from the stacks,” he said. “There’s not much I can do except reserve it for you and keep an eye out for it.”

Fair enough, I thought, because I don’t have unreasonable expectations about what can and can’t be retrieved from library stacks.

I pretty much thought the book was a lost cause so imagine my surprise when I popped into the library today and the librarian said, “There’s a message here for you: since we couldn’t find the book you were looking for we’ve ordered a new copy.” Then she apologised because that would mean a bit of a delay in me getting it!

I told her not to worry; I thought it was amazing that they were ordering a book for me, just because I requested it. What wonderful customer service!

A Little Head Never Hurt Anybody

I’m guessing this is the work of the same person.

I saw two of these in Prahran the other day:

They made me smile.

Blogoversary 4

Another blogoversary. I’m going to resist the temptation to analyse the last 12 months. Instead all I’ll say is that last weekend, I finally fulfilled a year-long ambition.

It was worth getting the second visa just for this:

Thrill the World Melbourne 2012

Your Someone’s Reason to Masturbate

I saw this near Prahran Station the other day. I liked it. I was flattered. But then only a fraction of a second later I spotted the “your” blunder and was instantly deflated. If only I wasn’t such a colossal wanker myself I could have basked in the compliment for a little longer.

Stitching up City Square 2013 – The Yarn Bomb Approximation

I borrowed a great book from the library, 200 Crochet Blocks by Jan Eaton, and I’m using some of the designs in my City Square yarn bomb. I really like these squares with star and waterlily motifs but I’m wondering if they make the squares I did earlier look crap in comparison?

I’m also having some problems with measurements. The earlier squares were 13 cm x 13 cm; these newer ones are 15 cm x 15 cm. I’m planning to make my rows up out of either five small squares (65 cm across) or four of the bigger ones (60 cm across). Obviously this will lead to rows of different widths, which is no good. My solution, I think, will be to add a border to the larger squares to bring them up to just over 16 cm x 16 cm (meaning four across comes up to 65 cm in width), or to loom some small pieces to fill in the gaps. I’ll figure it out nearer the time.

At the moment my main concern is the length of the piece as a whole. It’s currently on 1.08 m, which took five weeks to do. It needs to be 4 m in total so let’s approximate by saying I need to do three times as much again. I want to finish by the end of the year but there are only 11 weeks to go, not the 15 I need if I continue at the same rate. So I need to pick up the pace a little.

From now on I’m going to aim for 16 cm x 16 cm squares and I reckon I need around 76 of them to complete the piece. That means I need to produce 7 squares a week, or one per day.

This is going to be quite a challenge but I think if I put some serious time in at the weekends it should be all right.