When I first started thinking about doing some political yarnbombing in Berkeley California I immediately wanted to do Nabolom Bakery .
Along time ago I used to make my living by teaching knitting and spinning yarn. I had a student who pretty much single handedly kept me in business by taking every knitting class and coming into my shop every Saturday and buying all my yarn.
Recently that woman , Julia Elliot re-opened Nabolom bakery with her partner Sabra and began to make pizza and cinnamon twists with the same passion and joy that she had been knitting and buying yarn. Everybody in Berkeley who knew Nabolom bakery was ecstatic that Julia re-opened it (it had sadly closed a couple years ago).
This idea of putting up the “Pom Pom and Politics Project”at Nabolom Bakery came to me in May 2017. I came by the bakery and persuaded Julia and Sabra to sit around with me and make a bunch of pink pom-poms. Making pom-poms is a lot of fun and they agreed to let me install on their storefront.
Well many months went by as I tried to get a grip on how you might make and install hundreds of pom-poms. As with so many brilliant ideas I had no idea what I was doing and no idea that I didn’t know what I was doing. After many maddening experiences with fishing line and alarming experiences with ladders I finally understood how to do a really big pom-pom installation. I guess it’s a pretty strange and even absurd skill to know how to do pom-pom installations but I’m happy to say that we were able to install 400 pom-poms with great pleasure off the roof of Nabolom on August 1, 2017.
Of course people stopped and wanted to know what the deal with all these pom-poms. And I would say it’s an art installation or the pink pom-poms are like the pink pussy cat hats , they symbolize women’s rights and human rights. People were very eager to write on the cards that I tie into the installation, they wrote what they were for in their politics and one woman smiled at me and said “oh I get it , it’s not what we are against but what we are for “.
Streetcolor 