Yarnbombing Orinda and Cheering Up

” Do you know I’m crazy?” I ask my partner as I come in the door.

“Oh yes ” he says matter of factly as he looks into his silver computer. ” But it’s a good kind of crazy . “

I had realized I was crazy when I was  measuring the Bart train. I have this idea of yarnbombing a Bart train -which is completely ludicrous , which makes me think it’s a great idea. I  crawling around  behind the Bart seat measuring and I noticed the other passengers were looking at me a little nervously. It made me want to laugh because I looked so silly but I thought that might worry every one  even more.

So you all know there was a New York Times article on yarnbombing and I wasn’t in it. I really moped about this , moped and also pouted. I tried many  methods to cheer myself up.

1. I looked at pictures of my baby friend smiling at me. I also watched a short video of her chewing on her small suede shows.

2. I told myself ” You win some  , you lose some. It’s not about winning or losing , it’s how you play the game. I just want to win one for the team. Soon I was happily imagining myself as a baseball player.

3. I whined and complained on Facebook.

4. I asked everyone for sympathy. This was actually extremely satisfying.

5. My best friend told me  “Go home and think about The Civil War! ” I always like to think about The Civil War.

Then  I went out to The Orinda Public Library and yarnbombed their bike rack.

My partner The Pied Piper and I had driven all over the Diablo area looking for good bike racks for me to yarnbomb. We went to Lafayette and looked at their library which had beautiful railings but no bike racks. We went to 2 Bart stations but they were too harsh. We were driving back to Berkeley when my partner said ” How about Orinda ? “

So we pulled off   Highway  24 and drove into Orinda.

What a sweet place! Lots of big, green, rustling trees. Great old theater , a cupcake store and ” Europa “-a European Hofbrau with the best reuben sandwiches. We had  a chocolate and a vanilla cupcake and we started to leave and I said  ” Can we just stop for a sec and look at their library? I hear it has a cafe ! “

So we raced over to the library , I ran over to the entrance and there was a big court yard full of sculpture  and a 4 loop bike rack , my favorite kind. Amazing.

So I went back on Sunday and yarnbombed it.  Betsy helped me , she says she doesn’t have a library degree so I shouldn’t call her The Librarian. She does have fantastic sewing skills.

I like this bike rack but it is a little busy. I seem to be  entering my rococo phase.

  Today’s blog links- An Italian blog about yarnbombing  here .

Another yarnbombing blog here .

Yarnbombing, Dating and The New York Times

Several weeks ago  I got an inquiry from The New York Times about my yarnbombing and I swooned. The New York Times!  My father would be so happy! I had wanted to be in the New York Times but I hoped that it would happen Someday , not so soon. I savored the swoony feeling and thought pleasurably about how an article in The New York Times would probably give me everything I ever wanted.  I also had a sinking feeling that this might be  hard and end badly.

I set up a phone date with the reporter and sat faithfully by the phone  for 2 hours and waited for her to call .  She didn’t call.  I e-mailed her and she quickly responded that there had been an earthquake and tsunami in Japan and that she would call me another time . Well . Japan , yes , that did seem more important. So I waited  and waited and waited and she didn’t call, she didn’t write , despite my checking my mail  obsessively. One morning as I was staring fixedly at my e-mail I thought  “This is such a familiar awful feeling. What was it reminding me of ? “

Then I realized it . I t was just like dating. I hated dating.

It was the waiting around that I hated. So what I did when I was dating is-I picked who I wanted to date and I called him. I didn’t need to have that ” Oh he has to pick me” feeling to feel wanted.

So I gave up on TNYT and thought  ” I  don’t need them , I  am just great with out them . ” So then they called.

So I did an hour interview on the phone on the way to the airport and my teeth only chattered a little bit. I gave her a list of other people to call and flew away.

Then another really long time went by and I gave up again . After a n interminable time the reporter wrote me and said ” My editors need to know your real name or your age , one or the other. Tell us.”

Terrible-I am totally wedded to my anonymity  but I really wanted to be in TNYT. Since this was dating I cornered a girlfriend and talked her ear off for 2 straight hours and then decided I couldn’t tell them my age or name, that I would be betraying what I believed in. So I wrote a little impassioned plea for anonymity and then waited for several more weeks and heard nothing. Then I heard that the article would soon be coming out and I kept checking for it . And then it came out  And everyone I had suggested to the reporter was in it and I wasn’t.

Oh man . Rejected . They broke up with me ! And they had started it ! The reporter told me that her editors had wanted it to be more international. Oh there’s always some reason the other person has to leave you.

I hope to get over this eventually

This flowery piece is my first commission , for Harvey, who waited 7 months for it. We all wait and make others wait.

I know it seems a funny contrast to The New York Times but here are 2 good articles an AOL   P atch website.

Berkeley Patch here.

Palo Alto Patch here.

Yarnbombing And Talking About Art

  First I want to write about how I made this. I was inspired by the show “Glee”. They sing mash ups of songs, putting 2 completely different songs together and singing back and forth between them. I wanted to put many different color styles together, stripes from fused glass, stripes from Picasso, patterns from African textiles, pastel Easter stripes, table cloth checkerboards, black and white jazzy stripes and color bleeds. Picasso said that every artist really has only one idea and my passion is for patterns next to each other. { What do you think your one great idea is? }

I knit in a marathon way for a month, all day and night with breaks for lifting weights so I don’t blow out my wrists.

When I read internet comments on this piece some suggest that this is a waste of time. I have thought that scooting around the internet saying harsh things is not a great use of time but perhaps they enjoy it. Knitting a lot is a very slow and calm use of time , the day goes by in many round moments.

There was a lot of discussion about this big bike rack on blogs and Twitter.{  I really don’t understand Twitter-How does it work?} I make art and put it out in public so everyone can see it and hopefully think about it and talk about it for a moment. I like that yarnbombing is something that lots of people have opinions about , I think if every one gets to talk you get a true democracy and lots of energy and creativity. And this is a strength of our age-everyone can talk. When someone comes on a site and says something hateful it can shut every one up. Any thing that shuts us up is not for life .

They have some really good singers and dancers on Glee and they make my hair stand on end. I also love when they have Flash mobs and every one dances. Yarnbombing lets anyone knit and put it out in the world and it also allows for some really extravagant expression. I want great singing and dancing and also everyone dancing and getting to speak.

There was a lot of blogging last week when this got around the internet. I liked that it was mentioned on library and bike rack sites.

A bike site here.

An architecture site here

This is a museum project I have been working on here.

Yarnbombing The Berkeley Public Library

Boy oh boy, I was nervous about this yarnbombing. I had been knitting for 4 weeks nonstop, I mean all day every day. This yarnbomb would be 80 ft long ,knitted in 10 sections, all handspun, to go up all at once on the 10 looped Berkeley Public Library bike rack. I had asked a crew of 5 people to help me sew it up. The 2 documentary guys were coming to watch. A writer was coming to talk to me. I had a pretty good idea of how the day would go and  I  thought it might include policemen.

I got up Sunday morning , packed lots of cheese and eggs to stay calm and drove over to the library. I had picked this site because I love this library so much, especially the art floor. It also had a huge bike rack and I wanted to make something much more ambitious.  I was saying a little prayer I made up to calm down and it wasn’t working. I tried some self talk ” You are a very good artist .You have nice hair” That didn’t work either. I finally said to myself:

“This is just to amuse yourself you know!” That actually made me calm.

  I got to the library and parked.  It was sunny and calm, a great day for yarnbombing . I noticed I had forgotten all my sewing yarn and called my sleeping partner and pleaded for him to get up and find my yarn. Mrs. Wong my first crew member arrived. I ripped up some knitting to get some wool and we started sewing  my knitting to the pole. Monica the writer took pictures. Leo and Jeremy arrived and started filming. Josh arrived and gave me my yarn and some hot chocolate . It was going well. More crew members arrived to sew. I’ll call them The Norwegian, Hargus Moon And Muddy Rose. It was getting quite festive. I can see now I was losing control of the situation. 3 police cars arrived.

“

  Has anyone  else noticed the police cars?” I asked ” You know when police arrive I usually pack up and move quietly away.”  We packed up quietly and I moved a little bit away and watched the police go into the library. I just sat and calmed downed the energy. I wanted to be there if they wanted to talk to me. They finally came out , looked at the bike rack for a while and drove away. I kept sitting.  My next crew member arrived.  She is a librarian so we’ll call her The Librarian. She is a very upstanding but fearless lady and she thought we should keep sewing. ” What can they do?” she said calmly.” They’ll just talk to us and we’ll talk to them”. So we sat down very inconspicuously amidst the bikes and sewed. I accidently sewed a strip around a bike lock. The bikers were very nice.

The bike racks were getting completely full of bikes, this is a very popular bike rack. The librarian was a sewing demon. I was a little chagrined that I has caused such a ruckus in front of the library and swore to be polite and discreet from now on. We finished the 10 loops It looked quite astonishing.

When I came back later to photograph it was already getting torn. This made me sad but I had to do it.

None of the woman in these pictures are me.

An interesting essay on International Yarnbombing in Forbes here

Berkeleyside Article here

Beautiful essay on yarnbombing  here.