Thanks to a cabal of “bombers,” cyclists visiting Westville’s ArtWalk this weekend will have a snuggly spot to stash their wheels.
At 11 a.m. Friday, Stephanie Maples (pictured with Caleb Maples and Rueben Gittelman) was putting the finishing touches on a new “yarn bomb” outside Manjares coffee shop on West Rock Avenue in Westville. She sewed together swatches of hand-knit yarn into a snug sleeve for one of two horseshoe-shaped bike racks on the sidewalk. Dorothy Gittelman was working on another nearby, as the two women’s children played.
Yarn-bombing describes the act of covering industrial objects with handmade materials, Maples explained. It can soften an urban environment of concrete and steel with color and coziness, the mark of a human hand. Yarn bombs in other towns have covered bikes, shopping carts, cars, parking meters, sculptures, and even converted a tank into a blanky.
Rueben Gittelman admires his mom’s needle work.
Maples said she’s not a particularly avid knitter, but Westville Village Renaissance Alliance Director Chris Heitmann asked her to drop some yarn bombs for this weekend’s ArtWalk festivities. The two-day art festival takes over downtown Westville starting Friday evening.
“I just sent an email to everyone I know who knits,” Maple said. After measuring the racks, she sent out the size of pieces she was looking for and started receiving patches of knitted fabric in the mail and dropped at her house.
As she finished up with the West Rock Avenue racks, Maples said she was headed next to a rack outside Delaney’s restaurant, and one outside the Westville post office.
While the yarn bombs are meant to be part of ArtWalk, Maples said she has no intention of removing them after the weekend. “I think we’ll just leave them up. See what happens to them.”
I would love to see more yarn bombs around town. The Town Green District should stop removing them.