Saturday, May 7, 2011

Look! An actual BOOK!

About 6 months ago I was approached via my Flickr account about contributing some photos to a book about yarnbombing. And just the other day, I got my copy in the post!
It is called Urban Knits, published by Prestel/Random House and for sale here. Here are my pages:








It's not entirely what I was expecting - I got sent a preliminary layout a while ago, where it looked like I was going to share a page with Olek, the famous and prolific NYC crochet-bomber, but none of her work is included in the final book. I have a suspicion that she asked for an actual fee, and wasn't content with just receiving a copy of the book (I managed to get two, but that's all). Anyway - it's a fun little book and good for showing off! Now I'm on a mission to get the Arnolfini Bookshop to start selling it - after all, there are at least two photos of the Arnolfini building in there!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Nothing lasts forever

If you're in Bristol, you probably know about the riots on Stokes Croft that happened over the past few weeks. I've not personally been affected, but some of my yarn bombs have (kind of). The night of the first riot, some of the cosies on the bridge got torched! I have no evidence that there was any connection but I can imagine that the heightened atmosphere could have led someone to take a lighter to our pieces. Nanna D's lovely striped piece was almost entirely gone, with only a few melted rings left, and my yellow hazard tape was scorched at the bottom. So I went over there today and took them off entirely, because it no longer looked good. This is what was left:


The limpets in Stokes Croft (located right in the midst of the riots!) were still intact, but as they kept sliding down, and were at quite a busy junction, got absolutely filthy, as well as kind of limp.

That's why I knitted a larger replacement, which should also fit more snugly and not slide down to dog-wee height so easily.