If this is your first time reading about it, you may wonder how an art as conservative as crochet was able to cross international borders to become a resonant urban movement around the world. Where every day more weavers join this sympathetic and innovative artistic model.
What is yarn bombing?
It is an urban movement that revolves around crochet weavers, with an imminent artistic particularity. His word, as it translates "thread bombing" although other names are also attributed to it, such as the crochet guerrilla, thread storm or even crochet graffiti. Whatever name you think is best to give it, it turns out to be an artistic initiative with great visual impact for everyone who sees it for the first time.
Can you imagine walking through a park on a normal winter day, when suddenly boom! Do you see a majestic tree surrounded by a crocheted coat with multiple radiant colors, or you go down one of the main avenues of London admiring its history, when in the distance you see what looks like a telephone booth but not just any, but a crocheted one can you imagine that? , insane without a doubt.
Or better yet, you walk past the statue of an iconic Philadelphia mayor and it just catches your eye, for wearing a daring custom-made pink bikini, crocheted of course.
This urban culture gave one of its first outbreaks in 2005 in Houston, when a knitter named Magda Sayeg was invited to knit the door of a boutique, from then on its multiplier effect began. The comparison that I am going to make may be a little indifferent, but this movement is perhaps a bit similar to a person who gets a tattoo for the first time. She feels emotion and adrenaline while doing it, and we don't know what happens, but such an effect seems incredible to her, to the point of wanting to experience it again and when she looks back, she already has five more tattoos.
Something like this happened with this movement, its visual impact is so beautiful that it is impossible not to see it, it is impossible not to comment on it and the weavers knew it. Many of them not only did it with the intention of filling many places with colors and getting admiration, but some also wanted to raise their voices in protest, since they had certain interests to defend in relation to politics, social inequality, machismo. and many other social problems.
As we mentioned, crochet has always been attributed to women without any relevance, without giving it the value it deserves when dealing with a piece of art such as a painting or a sculpture. They are all pieces of art, shared by human hands, full of creativity and dedication, but with crochet there seems to be a bit of indifference when it comes to classifying it and providing the same relevance within art.
Many weavers felt empathy for this, and began to form different groups on the internet, where people from all over the world connected, sharing techniques to achieve weaving in large pieces, sharing the materials used and the time it took to do it. A community began to be created that helped each other even without knowing each other, but that shared the same feeling thanks to their love for crochet.
However, not everyone was of the same opinion, another group of weavers did not see this urban intervention as a protest, but rather tried to remind other people that with colors and thread it was possible to unite, fill empty squares with colors and bring a little hope wherever maybe there wasn't anymore.
Whatever the objective of the creators of these majestic pieces around the world, they did a great job, because they dressed each place where one of them was installed with novelty. Crochet as a manual technique, which, in its essence, consists of joining link after link, making the strip grow more and more until it achieves such resistance that it makes it difficult to disarm easily. It reminds us that any art form that unites us is worth being recognized for.