Chirped by Tina & Cass

In our original post about gearing up for the Menlo Park Yarn Bloom, we promised you pictures of the final installation, and it’s time to deliver! The park looked crazy, cheery and colorful for the Earth Day festivities in April. Kudos to the organizers of all the Earth Day recycling/ repurposing/ reusing stations set up around the park that made for a great outdoor family- and eco-friendly adventure!

While the “tree hugger” blankets were scheduled to come down on May 24th, 2018, the fiber art on the man-made structures will stay up for much of the summer, as long as it holds up well to the elements and the “attentions” of its admirers… There’s even a fun “Seek and Find” poster mounted in one of the pavilions for kids to test their powers of observation. 

In case you’re wondering what the heck a Yarn Bloom is, it’s basically a flower-themed Yarn Bomb, (a.k.a. Granny Graffiti). It’s an example of an international phenomenon of fiber art installations springing up in public spaces to temporarily add a little fun and beauty to a locale. Sometimes they are stitched together in the dead of night by gangster grannies, but in this case the Bloom was assembled just before Earth Day weekend with the full support of the local borough. 😉 Trees, benches, fences, posts, pavilions and even a bicycle were decked out in spring colors and lively textures, using afghans, scarves, hats, gloves and unfinished yarn projects collected from the community. Pompoms, garlands, flowers, and novelty items were also created from donated yarn by local crafters, often in small groups or at community craft sessions…

While many of the community volunteers joined, extended, or accessorized the accumulated bits and pieces into “huggers” for the trees, our team, the “Hilltown Haberdashers,” had free reign to decorate our assigned pavilion posts with any theme we wanted. Our imaginations and creativity got to run amok! We assigned different team members to particular components of the designs, depending on their skill sets and interests. We had a Pom Pom Queen, several Master Crocheters, a couple of Seamstresses and a slew of Worker Bees who were learning as they went along and could fill in with finger knitting, French knitting, basic crocheted squares and circles, macramé, and untangling/winding the yarn… By the end, seventeen people, (including some teenage boys and a couple of full grown men), contributed to our final cooperative masterpieces! Here are some close-ups of our Charlotte’s Web Post…

Then there was the Rainbow Post, the Bears and the Bees Post, the Picnic Post…

…the Campfire Post, and a zoom-in on our Giant Flower!

Other groups decorated fence panels around the pool, including volunteers from the local food pantry, Pennridge FISH. They invited the public to bring a canned good donation and help them fill in the outline of a fish using tassels of t-shirt yarn. Our team is working on a second fish panel for the fence, also collecting food items for the pantry – but it’s still a work in progress so we’ll tell you more about that in a future chirp! 😉

If you’re local to the Perkasie, PA area and haven’t see the Bloom yet, stop by sometime this summer to check out the beautiful creations still adorning Menlo Park. Some of the tree hugger blankets and scarves will find their way to other locations in Perkasie after May 24th, or will be carefully disassembled and donated to animal shelters as dog and cat mats. Thanks to all the crafty friends, both longtime and brand new, that joined our awesome Haberdasher team, as well as the other local groups and individual volunteers who “knit together” to make this event such an enjoyable, community-building extravaganza! (Wish we could have gotten our whole team into one photo, but we’ll have to take what subgroups we could get…)

Here’s to community crafting! 😀