Yarn bombing art display returns to Sandpoint park
(Photo by CAROLINE LOBSINGER) Members of a Sandpoint area knitting group reinstall their art bombing display early Wednesday morning. Instead of a rainbow, the group decide to split the brightly colored yarn into warm tones and cool tones as part of their effort to brighten a dreary winter.
(Photo courtesy VICKI REICH) Strands of the yarn bomb ribbons lay in Vicki Reich’s driveway as they undergo assessment for damage.
(Photo by CAROLINE LOBSINGER)Members of a Sandpoint area knitting group reinstall their art bombing display early Wednesday morning.
SANDPOINT — A brightly colored yarn bombing that aimed to brighten winter has been reinstalled at the corner of Boyer Avenue and Cedar Street.
“Thank you to whoever turned it in,” group member Vicki Reich said. “We don’t know who did turn it in but we really appreciate the fact that they dove into a Dumpster to rescue the strips for us. We are very grateful for that.”
The second installation comes just over a week after the first effort to add the temporary art display to a pocket park near the busy intersection. However, less than 24 hours after the group installed the yarn bombing late Monday night, an unknown vandal cut them down.
For the second installation, the group decided to use a color wheel concept, separating the yarn into warm and cool colors. After repairs were made they decided to use black yarn to connect the strips where they had been cut by the vandal to remove them from the two trees.
“We decided to use black yarn and let the battle scars show,” Miller said.
They were excited, members said, to be able to reinstall the yarn bombing and grateful to whoever found the ribbons and turned them in.
The members said their only goal was to do something fun, to celebrate art and brighten what has been a cold and dreary winter.
“It honestly never occurred to us that people would take it badly or that anyone would object to it,” said member Trisha Miller. “I mean, rainbows, right?”
Reich was at work a day or two later when she happened to check her personal email and saw a message from the city letting her know that the strips had been turned in.
“I immediately ran down to the police station and was able to pick them up,” Reich said. “They were very nice there and informed me that it didn’t smell very good and had been found in a Dumpster.”
The next day Reich assessed the damage, laying them out in her driveway. It was clear it would “take quite a bit of sewing” to repair the yarn ribbons. She let her fellow knitters know and they were all determined that they wanted to reinstall the yarn bombing.
“We decided that we really wanted to put it back up,” she added. “The idea was never for it to be a political statement to begin with and so we made the decision to put it back up in a different color order. We came up with the idea of putting all the warm colors together and all the cool colors together.”
After assessing the damage, a few of the worst-smelling ribbons were washed due to the amount of work it would have taken to join the live ends where the ribbons had been cut to prevent them from unraveling. The group then made plans to get together Monday — 12 members were able to make it to the repair session — and got to work. Repairs took about an hour and a half to complete.
The knitters were excited the yarn ribbons had been found and really wanted to get them reinstalled as quickly as possible.
“So many people were like, ‘That’s so nice you did that,’” she said. “We wanted to put it back up. We all just thought, ‘This is something fun.’ Not, ‘This will probably piss people off.’”
The “yarn bombing” art display, its removal and its meaning drew heavy comment on social media posts with many condemning the removal of the yarn ribbons and others, while saying the removal was wrong, questioned if the display had a political meaning. Group members said the art project was simply that — a chance to put up a temporary art display and celebrate their love of rainbows.
“All we wanted to do was brighten up a bleak winter day when folks drive by there and give them a smile,” Miller said in an initial post announcing the disappearance of the display.
The group had originally intended to weave the strips into the fence along Dog Beach but BNSF crews had removed the fence and the knitters were looking for another location, Reich said. While often done without permission, Reich contacted the city of Sandpoint in the past month to request approval to install the art at the location.
The colorful knitted strips are part of a temporary display of public art — known as “yarn bombing” — on a few of the city’s trees and was done with the city’s permission by a group of local knitters who simply wanted to add a little color to Sandpoint. As such, the city entered into an agreement to allow the colorful, knitted ribbons to be wrapped around the base of the trees, Sandpoint officials said in a press release.
The trees approved for “yarn bombing” by the knitting group are located on city-owned right-of-way. The temporary display, once returned and reinstalled, would be removed by June 14, 2020, to ensure the health of the trees.
“Yarn bombing” — also known as yarn storming, guerrilla knitting, kniffiti, urban knitting, or graffiti knitting — has becoming popular in cities across the globe, and includes tree wraps such as the ones that were installed by the local knitters. Other cities have had displays ranging from wraps on bicycle racks to entire buses.
Caroline Lobsinger can be reached by email at clobsinger@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @CarolDailyBee.