My first dumpster dive in Vancouver

I've decided that the Michael's dumpsters in Vancouver and Richmond are not as good as the one in Waterloo. I think the reason is that the staff are less wasteful, or possibly we just picked a terrible night to go. The most exciting thing we found was the top of a plastic palm tree and some shiny decorative xmas foliage. We used a piece of that for this piece of street art (the green leaf right above 'bike')


The gray thing on the top was attached mobius style - I'm still completely amused by mobius strips as yarn bombs


And this is another campus tag. It's outside an entrance that I don't think gets used much, but I hope it amuses a few people. That enormous green bin is for used coffee and tea packets only - I found that kind of exciting.

Mobius Tag

This is so exciting. It just occurred to me that it is super easy to make mobius strip yarnbombs because as long as the front and back of the fabric are the same, you can make it a mobius strip when you attach it. Now I want to cover the city with them. So far just one, have been working on too many other (non-public) knitting projects. I'm way too amused by this.

Broadway Bombs

We hit up West Broadway today with a few more yarn bombs. We noticed that all of the tags we've put up on parking meters have been taken down, except for one that is on the base of one of them.. the parking nazis must have missed it.

This is a bike rack and Ian's shoes.


This is a beard for a tree.. treebeard?


We thought that the staff at Benny's would appreciate some colour when they look out the window.

Campus tag

Put up a yarnbomb at UBC campus today. I haven't seen any others, but that doesn't mean they don't exist... certainly at this time it is one of the more noticeable ones. It is close to the Student Union Building, in a high traffic area. One girl told me that she 'didn't know what purpose that was supposed to serve, but it looks cool!' - I'll take it :)

Starstruck!

So I haven't kept up my blog AT ALL since I left Waterloo, which is not so good. I know that very few people look at it, but I liked having it... for my records... to keep me motivated... I dunno. But. This is going to change.

It's not that I haven't been yarnbombing in Vancouver - because I have! - it's that I haven't been yarnbombing in my own neighbourhood. And when I do it, I never have my camera with me. Blog with no pictures = quite uninteresting in my opinion. I know it's a stupid excuse and I should just bring my camera with me.

My reason for wanting to blog again is that I met a celebrity on Saturday. The lovely lady on the left, Leanna Prain, was at Canzine West. (The woman sitting beside her is co-author of Yarn Bombing, Mandy Moore - whom I did not meet.)

Not only did I meet her but I sold her a copy of my minizine about yarnbombing. She said 'I wrote a book about yarnbombing, so I HAVE to buy this'!! As I sat there awestruck my wonderful friend Terri (who was sharing the table with me) had the guts to chase after her with Yarn Bombing II and gave it to her. Then she came back and asked me if she could interview me for her blog! It was quite exciting.

Apart from that, I sold a few copies of my first zine and gave away more because of a promotion Terri and I were having, and then I traded most of the rest. My other one did not do as well, but frankly I don't think it was as good and I need to redo the cover.

While I'm at it, I guess I will post some pictures of some of the yarnbombs I've put up since leaving Waterloo. I haven't photographed many though :(

These are from Portland in late August/early September, when we went down for the Portland Zine Symposium.

This one was made in the train and placed as soon as we got to the station. My friends stopped for a cigarette and I put this one up. It was gone by the time we had to leave six days later :(

This one was outside a cafe that AlexAlgebra brought us to - they served me a VEGAN EGGS BENNY! Oh I love Portland <3

This was right around Cup and Saucer, another excellent breakfast joint that we make a point of coming to whenever we are in town.

These two were outside of the Red and Black Cafe, a worker-owned cafe which is probably my favourite place ever. Tempeh rueben to diiiiiiiie for.

I can't remember exactly where this last picture I have from Portland is, but I do remember that they had hippos like this all around the building and it was amazing.

This is the only one I have a picture for in Vancouver. These yarn bombs were made by Alex for a yarnbombing swap I hosted on swap-bot. So strange - I met up with him to teach him more about crochet, and he ended up being my partner!

Goodbye Waterloo....

I am about to leave this lovely city... so these will be the last yarnbombs I put up in Waterloo for a little while.

This I have been slowly adding to over the last little while.. I plan on sending more bits and getting friends to put them up for me. This section of the rail is less than a quarter the total length, and I want to eventually cover the whole thing.


Epic yarnbomb - the massive 'Need a hug?' pole. Because it's just so... huggable! I put this up two days ago, and have seen a couple people hugging it so far. I hope it gets lots of hugs...


Well Waterloo, it's been fun covering you in knitted pieces. I will miss you. I plan on visiting again someday.

The latest

An assortment of pictures since the last time I posted...

A bunch of butterflies I whipped up on the bus into Toronto, left them all on this weird metal thing. The sort of look like they're dancing


A bench that also got butterflied... can you tell I had too much of this sparkly purple yarn?


More butterflies... this time they are clustering around a flower on a rail in the clock tower thing outside the Perimeter Institute on King


This is a pipe outside the lovely Waterloo Public Library, in an area infested by mosquitoes (as I learn while I was putting it up)


A pipe in a pothole in a parking lot... alliteration much?


I'm actually not sure what this metal thing is, but I figured it needed a bright green shag covering - doesn't everything?


Kevin's fancy crochet bike rack bomb got taken down, so I replaced it with this one... did I mention I like shag? So much fun!


Here I added the blue bit to the existing purple tag on a pipe in guerrilla alley (dubbed so by Nick because of the guerrilla gardening going on in it)

Noticed by the regional councilor, what?

Eeeeek so exciting! A friend just linked me to the Waterloo Regional Councilor Jane Mitchell's twitter - she tweeted about yarnbombs! No pictures, so I'm not sure what she saw. Probably not these, because they just went up:

Pretty pipe


Girlie girl's dream garbage can (from 2 angles) - frills were there before, the flower and butterfly are new

Knitting machines and the colour purple

I donated one of my knitting machines (I had two) to kwartzlab last night, about an hour after I learned how to use it. I managed to make this


in the span of a song. Well it was kind of a long song, but still! Since there is no sense of scale to this picture, the piece is about a foot long and maybe 6 inches wide. Though I'm estimating after the fact and could be horribly wrong.
Knitting machines are amazingly efficient! I was almost sad to give it away, but I know that the kwartzlabers will make good use of it. They are excited to make their own yarnbombs!

This is the promised purple tag for the nice lady from a couple nights ago. It's kind of hard to see because of the dark on dark and my poor photography skills.


When I was photographing it (after it was up), a teenage girl asked me how they put those up. I explained that they were mostly sewn up and sometimes zip-tied, and she proceeded to tell her boyfriend (?) that 'some woman is putting these up all over the place.... it's SO WEIRD!!!!' - completely unaware that it was me. It was all I could do to not burst out laughing until they were out of earshot. I guess not everyone likes them.

While I was putting this one up, the dude working at the LCBO ran across the street in his apron to question me. As if I'd disappear if he stopped to take his apron off. It was kind of funny. And then a woman told me that her daughter thought that they magically appeared at night, as if placed by pixies. That was nice. I sort of don't want her to disappoint her daughter, because unfortunately I am not a pixie. Maybe I should get/make some pixie wings and wear them when yarnbombing? I like this idea!


I just learned how to crochet butterflies, and now I want to put them everywhere... So happy.

More of the same

Have been slowly attacking the garbage cans - attacking with whimsy! hehehe. Here are a couple pics

This one is outside Uptown 21. I met the wonderful lady that owns it and her adorable daughter a little while ago. The daughter (age 4 maybe? I'm bad at guessing kids' ages) told me that she really liked my knit thingies, so I made this with her in mind.


Last night I put this one up. I'm starting to think that yarnbombing is one of the few acceptable uses of eyelash yarn.


While I was putting it up, a lady came and talked to me about how these things made her happy. She had a really interesting suggestion: to create a system whereby people could donate surplus yarn for yarnbombing purposes! I thought that was a really cool idea. She seemed to think that people would do this.. I'm not sure, but I certainly wouldn't say no to yarn donations! Maybe at some point I'll organize such a system.
I found out that her favourite colour is purple and I'm going to tag a pole outside her place of work as soon as possible.

This is the caterpillar tag from a little while ago.


Closeup to try to capture the awfulness of the yarn:


And here's a set of pipes in an alley that I'm slowly beautifying.

And we're back

Finally fixed the camera situation! So happy.

Have been doing a lot of yarnbombing - mostly garbage can frills, but random other things too. Have been a bit lazy about taking pictures, but here are a few recent ones:

One of many garbage cans - it has frills on the back too


This was supposed to be an 'if Lydia (from cartoon Beetlejuice) wore argyle, she'd wear this' scarf - but I think it's better on a pole, except that it makes the diamonds look a bit weird


Flower


Tree cozy


(Wonky) moustache for a pipe. I kind of want to put moustaches on everything now....


Oh man, I should take a picture of the HIDEOUS caterpillar-y tag I put up. Cuz it's fun. And fuzzy. Will post later.

Artz Lab

So I went to KW Artz Lab openspace last night for the first time. It is a hacker space that opened up about a year ago. I'd been meaning to go for a while now, but it finally happened. They are AMAZING!!!! I LOVE THEM!!!
What it is is a 'hacker space'? I can't really put into words myself (beyond gushing adjectives) so I will let wikipedia talk for me:

A hackerspace or hackspace (also referred to as a hacklab, makerspace or creative space) is a location where people with common interests, usually in computers, technology, or digital or electronice art can meet, socialise and collaborate. A hackerspace can be viewed as an open community lab incorporating elements of machine shops, workshops and/or studios where hackers can come together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things.

It's pretty much a bunch of really cool people getting together with big machines to MAKE STUFF. People donate all kinds of things, so that users have access to fancy equipment that would be too large or too costly to have at home.
My reason for going, apart from sheer curiosity, was to talk to them about donating a knitting machine. Despite the fact that no one really knew how to knit, everyone's reaction was 'Awesome!'. The lady who runs Queen of Hearts costume shop on King in uptown was there, and she seemed especially interested in the knitting machine. But a bunch of guys started talking about 'knit bombing' in Waterloo and how they could use this to do some mad knitbombing in Kitchener. So exciting!!!!! I told them they'd make me EXTREMELY happy if they used the machine to make yarnbombs.
Now I have to learn how to use said knitting machine so that I can demonstrate next week. Though of course I'm quite sure that they would be more than capable of figuring it out themselves.

Backdating

So I stopped posting recently because I dropped the thing that lets my SIM card talk to my computer, so while I have pictures I can't do anything with them at the moment :(

This doesn't mean that I've stopped yarnbombing though! In fact, there has been much excitement recently. And other people have picture that I'm going to steal because they're better than mine anyways. And I'm a stealer. I took them from here and here

Here are the top three exciting things that have happened in the last couple weeks:

1. Last Thursday, Zilliah and I dangle-bombed the rock garden on campus. It was exciting. A really awesome girl was playing the harmonica below us and didn't notice until we started releasing them (we attached them all and let them down at the end), and she said some very nice things. The construction workers seemed amused if confused.








2. The manager of Chainsaw 'caught' me yarnbombing and hinted that he wanted me to get their patio. This was on Wednesday. By Friday, Zilliah and I had put these up.



3. All of the bike racks uptown have been hit! Except for 6(?) outside the Valumart, which I think we will do but I am a bit hesitant because they might not be city property.. and I did one of them in the fall and it got taken down pretty quickly. But it's possible that now that all the other bike racks are cozy, these ones will stay. I'm not going to put pictures because there are about 22 of them and a bunch have already been photographed here anyways. But it's exciting!

Next project: frills for garbage cans. Mwahaha

Last comment: on Chainsaw adventure day, we heard two really good alternate ways of describing yarnbombing that I think are actually kind of better:
Granny graffiti (!!!!!!!!!)
The cozy brigade (in reference to us)
It was exciting.

Can't you bomb something else?

No. I want to get them all. I think it would be really awesome if somehow my little town became known for having whimsical bike racks, in addition to the things we are already known for. Someone else is also decorating bike racks around here, which is super happy :)

So I was being all sketchy last night and doing my yarn bombing in the dark because I didn't have a chance during the day, and I put up these 2.

A latte brown one by the monster coffee chain


Purple-y black by the LCBO


Some drunk dude saw me and rambled at me about streetsareforpeople.org, and while that isn't exactly what yarn bombing is about I'm all for movement away from cars so it was appreciated. I guess making bike racks pretty encourages people to bike instead of drive? Not my intention but I like the idea!

And then today I put up a bee-inspired one by the health-food store, which was met with the comment 'That's a welcome improvement!' from a mother and her teenage son.