Just this, because I couldn’t help myself:

 

How's it sit? Purrrty cunning, don't you think?

Remember how I did a Regretsy yarnbomb on the Jim Boggio statue and got all kinds of love from April for it and she posted that I was going to make a hat out of the “whimsicle fuckery” piece that I’d made?  OK, maybe you don’t, but I sure do!  I took the piece down after taking the photos, because it’s not everyone’s cuppa, and I wouldn’t want to cause offense, and not everyone would understand.  Anyway, here’s the pic:

CF4L Whimsicle Fuckery

So I ended up making this, which I finished today, and which is modeled by my lovely and talented friend Heather:

 

Whimsicle Perkele Hat Modeled by Heather

Yes, I am sending a mobile yarnbomb to Finland, on the head of one of my favorite people, and I couldn’t be more pleased.  I love this hat to death, especially the rear view.

Perkele means something vaguely naughty in Finnish, and has become the semi-official cheer, I guess, for April Winchell’s goodwill tour/book-writing expedition, which has raised more than $15,000 for charitable causes before even packing a single suitcase.  Well done.  Although the Kickstarter effort has ended, she is always accepting donations for folks in need.  It’s not all 501(c)3’d out the wazoo, it’s just good decent folks trying to keep their fellow humans from going all the way down the drain in hard times.  You can read more about what she does on the Charity page of Regretsy.

What more can I say except,

Snoopy statue, Railroad Square, Santa Rosa, CA - Namaste, Bitches!

First of all, my heartfelt thanks to April over at Regretsy for posting about me and linking to my blog (you need to enter the password, cf4l, to see the post).  The number of subscribers has tripled overnight, so welcome, both of you.  I haven’t added much to the knitted landscape lately as I’ve been getting caught up on other projects (a pair of long-overdue slippers for one friend, a Jayne hat for another, projects for April’s Army, etc.)

Streetcolor is planning a major effort in Oakland in October that I’ve offered to help with, and there’s a breast cancer awareness thing in the works, so there’s that to look forward to.

I guess it’s a stretch to call it yarn bombing, but I was, in a sense, able to yarn bomb a Burning Man wedding this year, courtesy of friends Hugh and Anila, who asked me to knit wedding “rings” for them to put around each other’s necks for their ceremony on the Playa.  I was given very general instructions and free rein, and was told the results are exactly what they’d pictured….

Wedding "rings" for Hugh & Anila

A couple images from the ceremony (which I did not attend – Burning Man being a bit out of my league):

I got interviewed for an article in The Community Voice about my yarn bombs in and around Cotati.  Pretty nice!

In other news, Steve and I set out to (briefly) yarn bomb the Golden Gate Bridge for Regretsy’s recent CF4L contest, and won a prize for this photo:

CF4L at the Golden Gate Bridge SE viewpoint

 

Very grateful to April for whatever weird and wonderful thing is due to show up in my mailbox this week.  In the mean time, I took the pieces down so I wouldn’t get in trouble with park authorities, and put them back up here:

CF4L on the "Golden Gate Bridge"

 

Yes, I do have a 6′ x 4′ replica of the Golden Gate Bridge in my dining room. Doesn’t everyone?

 

It’s Accordion Festival time here in Cotati, California, and the day I’ve been preparing for ever since I realized I couldn’t finish this piece in time for IYBD.  I bring you the Jim Boggio statue, dressed as the King of the Stomach Steinway:

Jim Boggio: King of the Stomach Steinway

The organizers of the event loved it, and even acknowledged me from the stage, and I saw many people taking photos of each other with the statue, so I think this will be one well-documented piece, even if it is only up for two days.

Crown & robe knit for Boggio statue in Cotati, CA

King of the Stomach Steinway

I’ve just returned from a week in Alaska with my sweetie, and finally found a tree in Sitka to stitch up a piece I’ve been holding onto for quite some time.  Back when my dear friend Jeanne was struggling with the cancer that ended up killing her (god damn fucking cancer) I wanted to make her a lacy scarf in a brilliant shade of blue.  Her sensitive skin couldn’t tolerate wool, but I found the most beautiful saturated blue silk, and a lace pattern called “spider stitch,” which was perfect, since her husband’s name is Spider.

So I knitted like mad and finished this lovely thing, blocked it, and while it was drying started fretting because it had that weird smell that silk sometimes does, and I thought she might not be able to wear it smelling like that.  PANIC!  I rushed out and bought another yarn entirely, one made from sugar cane that was very soft, but the color wasn’t nearly as vivid, and it lacked the lovely sheen of the silk scarf I’d already made.  I started knitting the second scarf, but ultimately, I gave her the silk one, the smell was not a problem, and she was wearing it the last time I saw her alive.  The second scarf sat unfinished on needles from then on, and Jeanne’s been gone for more than a year now.

I’d met Spider and Jeanne before going to Alaska with them in 2007, but it was in Alaska that we really became friends, and it felt somehow right to find a place in Alaska to put up that unfinished scarf I’d started knitting for Jeanne.  I finally got it stitched onto a tree just moments before I had to get onto the bus that took us to the Sitka airport and on our way back home.  Two little girls came up and asked me about it and I did a horrible job of explaining what I was doing.  Hopefully they’ll read this and have a better idea what it’s about.  My dear friend Sharon was on hand and took photos, which I’ll post when I receive them. In the mean time, I have this:

My Jeanne yarnbomb in Sitka

And just for the heck of it (not at all yarn related) another photo I took yesterday:

I actually know the guy who wrote this article, but he had no idea it was me he was writing about!  Love it!!

A close knit Valley - Dave Karraker speculates on what kind of wacky old lady would knit (and crochet) stuff and put it up in public for no apparent reason. Hey, I'm not THAT old. Yet.

Oh, and does it count if you yarnbomb yourself?  Over at Regretsy there’s been a recent “thing” where folks have been messing with the letters offered for sale in craft stores etc.  “CF4L” has special meaning for Regretsy fans, as does goatse, for reasons which I am not going to try to explain, so when I decided to go out on a CF4L mission, I made myself a suitably insane disguise:

cf4l

If you don’t know what it is you’re looking at, trust me, you don’t want to know.

Finally getting around to some long overdue updates!  First of all, I was invited to participate in a group project for the Sonoma 4th of July parade, seven of us collaborating to cover a Smart car with red white and blue knit and crochet.  I got to do the hood and front bumper, for which I made a flag, a smile, and a few fill-in bits.  I wasn’t able to attend the parade, but here are some photos:

Knitted/Crocheted Smart Car July 4, 2011, Sonoma, CA

Knitted/Crocheted Smart Car July 4, 2011, Sonoma, CA

Knitted/Crocheted Smart Car July 4, 2011, Sonoma, CA

It’s got me thinking…  Maybe someday I’ll decide to cover my Miata with knitting.  In the mean time, there are so many other projects, including ongoing work on existing ones.  My Cotati bike rack piece never was quite finished before one part of it got damaged and another part got kind of saggy, so I got to work making a new piece for that, which I got put up this morning:

Revised revision of the proposed, modified bike rack yarn bomb on Old Redwood Highway, near Friar Tuck's in Cotati

I had a good time crocheting the dots.  This could become a recurring theme.  Incidentally, the previous day’s parade featured an entry sponsored by Friar Tuck’s, the establishment you can see in the background of the above photo.  Maybe it’s a coincidence that they went with “We (heart) Cotati,” maybe not:

Cotati Kids' Day Parade July 16, 2011

In other news, there’s been a bridge rail near my sweetie’s home that I’ve been meaning to put something on for some time.  It had something ugly scribbled on it in paint marker, and I really wanted to cover that up, so now it looks like this:

Bridge on Ross St. in Cotati

And finally, I stopped by Tillie’s yarn shop in Sonoma to add another piece to her tree, the first time I’ve had the pleasure of climbing a tree for the purpose of yarn bombing:

Up a tree at Sonoma Yarn

Tillie and her tree

Meanwhile, three of my earlier pieces have come down.  The one I put up at the corner of Arnold and Grove was taken down by the workers who service the traffic signals (I happened to be driving past when they were tossing it into the back of their truck).  It lasted a month, though, so that’s not bad.  The one at Arnold and Mission disappeared a few days later.  That was on a traffic signal pole too, so I’m maybe sensing a pattern here.  The third came down today at my own hands – the granny square thing on highway 12 near Tillie’s shop was looking pretty sad, so I took it down.  I plan to wash it and possibly find another use for it elsewhere.  Other than some sun fading, it held up pretty well, but it always was too big for the pole I put it on.

Back to the knitting….

Back from Pennsylvania, where my sweetie’s folks very much embraced the idea of adorning Penn State’s statues with whimsical knittany, if only briefly.  First up was what I initially heard as “the Joe Pistachio” but actually turned out to be “the Joe-Pa statue.” So sue me, I’m a new initiate to the strange world of college football.

At any rate, this also proved to be the first time since I started doing this stuff that my sweetie managed to overcome his deep-seated aversion to participating in anything even marginally subversive, when I discovered I wasn’t tall enough to deploy the finger cozy I’d whipped up for the Great Man himself:

Joe Paterno's Finger Cozy

Of course no statue at Penn State is more attractive to the guerilla knitter than the Knittany Nittany Lion Shrine, but I also knew that anything I put there would be a nuisance to the constant parade of people who want to be photographed with it.  My compromise: I staged the photo below, removed the knitting, and redeployed it nearby.

The Nittany Lion learns to knit

I even went so far as to paint the back ends of the needles, which were originally red, so they would match the school’s colors, and not those of arch-rival Ohio.  I’d have preferred to have posed the knitting as if there were a row in progress, but the needles just weren’t long enough.

At any rate, I made some more lion toes and an ankle, for a variation on the ever-popular monster foot, and placed it at the base of the sign near the statue that explains its history, and cast off the blue and white piece and wrapped the signpost with it:

Knittany Lion Paw/Nittany Lion Sign

Nittany Lion Sign

That was first thing Sunday morning (Father’s Day).  Then it was off to breakfast and church and all manner of other family activities.  It was still there at the end of the day, but the upper piece had slid down so it looked like a sock, which I actually liked better:

Nittany Lion Sign

Sadly, the campus maintenance personnel, ever diligent in their duties, removed it Monday morning, but it was fun while it lasted.

The other piece I did on campus was at the suggestion of my sweetie’s parents: a charming statue on the lawn of what used to be the President’s house and is now the Alumni Center.  I crocheted virtually non-stop from the moment they suggested the idea until I ran out of the yarn I’d purchased at the local yarn shop:

In general it’s my feeling that good statues need no enhancement from the likes of me, so I took the garland down after taking the photos, and am still trying to decide where to put it.  I had hoped to find a home for it somewhere in State College, but I slept too late Monday morning.  Rats!

More projects in the works, of course….  Top secret stuff with some of my new-found knitty friends, and new ideas brewing all the time.  Ciao for now.

I decided a couple days ago to decorate the lamp posts on both sides of the Ig Vella Bridge, in honor of Sonoma native son Ig Vella, who passed away last week.  A legendary cheesemaker and cantankerous but invaluable member of the Sonoma community, his death at the the age of 83 was not a tremendous surprise, but sad nonetheless.  Here are the photos of my crocheted additions to the bridge:

Crocheted Flowers on Ig Vella Bridge

I’ve also recently made an addition to one of Saturday’s yarn bombs:

I Heart Cotati

I plan to finish off the last few feet of the bike rack eventually.  I’ve got about half of the remaining portion knitted and ready to go, but I haven’t had a chance to get into Cotati to put it up.  A friend has informed me she saw someone taking a photo of this  the other day, which is kinda fun, I think!

So anyway, I’m traveling with my sweetie, visiting his parents on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary, and we were passing through the Detroit airport with loads of time to fill waiting for our connecting flight.  I put a little crocheted piece up on a pole, and a woman watched me while I was working. I looked over and smiled at her, and she asked me about what I was doing.  I couldn’t place her accent, but some kind of European.  Was I getting paid to do it?  No, it’s just something I like to do.  Sort of a gift to the airport, then?  Yes, I suppose, or at least I hope people see it that way!  Won’t someone steal it?  Maybe.  Sometimes my pieces stay up for a long time and sometimes they don’t.  At any rate, it will be interesting to see if it’s still there on our return.  If you happen to be passing through the C terminal, it’s near gate C18.  Let me know!

Detroit Airport, Gate C18

Now we’re in State College, PA, where we’re staying at the Knittany Lion Inn (OK, there’s no K in Nittany).  The Nittany Lion is the Penn State icon, and I have plans anon for the big cat.  In the mean time, a little something for Joe Paterno:

JoPaYaBo