The Saffron Walden Knitted Maze: Yarnbombing with a Twist

Seen in Oxford: Poster for a Yarny Fund-Raiser at Darn It & Stitch

Well, people, Mr. Trask and I are back from our whirlwind jaunt to Oxford to find a home. We did find a place we liked, and applied for it – so send good vibes toward our rental application. It’s a terraced house in Jericho, just a handful of blocks from Port Meadow Designs and their cache of Manos del Uruguay yarn. Mr. Trask has already mentioned his concern about this more than once.

The brief and hectic nature of our trip meant that I wasn’t able to go to Knit Nation or to check out Darn It & Stitch, but I will have 3 years in which to do such things. [I keep reminding myself of this, so I don’t pout. It’s so annoying when I pout.] However, I do have some nifty UK knitting content for you: information on the fabulous yarn-bombing being organized by Twist Yarns‘ Sophie Durlacher as part of the Saffron Walden Maze Festival.

Sophie is a dynamo: she founded Twist (“your local yarn shop online”) last year and already she’s established enough to be accepted to the Knitting and Stitching Show 2011 in London in October (will I be there? Oh, yes, I will). Her company is an online yarn shop, but she also does in-home events, much as fibre space did when it first started out as Knit-A-Gogo.

With all this going on, naturally Sophie needed something else to do. So when her town, Saffron Walden, started a maze festival this year, she volunteered to help them include a “knitted maze.” [Saffron Walden has two mazes in their town – a hedge maze and an ancient turf maze – and the maze festival will celebrate the town’s unique history with mazes and maze culture.] First, though, she had to figure out what a knitted maze might be. The planners initially had planned something two-dimensional, but Sophie thought she could reach out to the knitting community in Britain to make the knitted maze really special.

More Yarn Giveaway: Artyarns (first and third from the left) and Fibre Company (2nd and 4th from the left).

“Using the existing mazes, we decided to recreate one of them, either by “bombing” it or creating an identical maze right next to it. The turf maze was the obvious candidate – it’s very near the centre of town on the Common. The Turf Maze is an ancient monument, so we are looking at re-creating it on the Common next to it, or even overlaying it, if the weather permits.” To get enough knitting for her vision, Sophie reached out to knitters in her town and far beyond, using word-of-mouth and a Ravelry group. Before long, the maze project had garnered a mention in beautiful UK magazine The Knitter and was featured in the local press. A knit-along on Worldwide Knit in Public Day attracted knitters throughout the day and got the project past the halfway point.You can see photos of young and old, male and female, new knitter and old hand knitting in the Creating the Knitted Maze Picasa album for the day.

What happens after the festival at the end of August?  The maze will have an afterlife, Sophie says. “We will make blankets for the local neo-natal unit, felting anything feltable, reusing what we can, and sewing the maze into useful things for charity.”

Want to help? If so, Sophie says, “Knit, knit, knit.” Strips should be between 9 and 12 inches wide and “as long as sanity permits.” I’m cheating by seaming together a few smaller strips, but you can do as Sophie does: ” I go for big yarn, fat needles, and an absence of style.” More creative folks are knitting with crime scene tape, video cassette tape (recycling!), denim, even washing line. The sky’s the limit!

I’ll be sending my strips off to the UK and would be happy to include yours – just send me an e-mail and let me know. As with the Knit a Tiny Hat challenge, anyone who donates a strip can choose whatever they like from my stash – and, let me tell you, there’s still some great stuff in there, including some Neighborhood Fiber Company Worsted and Malabrigo Merino Worsted, both in sweater quantities. Yum!

Can you believe this yarn? Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, from this year's Rockin' Sock Club.

Speaking of the stash, we’ve got some more winners of past giveaways: affiknity, Robin, Kitten with a Whiplash, Carolyn, Trudy, and Michele. As always, the Random Number Generator picked these lucky folks. This week, we have a cornucopia of yarn to give away:

1. Artyarns Supermerino: two skeins, one in Color 149 and one in Color 140.

2. Fibre Company: one skein of Terra in Mint and one skein of Organik in Fjord.

3. Socks that Rock: one skein of Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks That Rock Lightweight in colorway Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (from this year’s Rockin’ Sock Club!)

Comment on the blog by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, July 27 for a chance to win. And, hey, if you have a preference among the three yarny options, let me know what it is. I generally just pick at random, but might be able to find a way to get everyone chosen what they want. We can try, anyway, right?

As always, the yarn has lived in airtight containers in our non-smoking, one-cat house, and will be frozen for 24 hours before mailing.  If you want to contribute to the cost of shipping the yarn, go here, but please remember that you aren’t required to do that. Comment away! Have you ever yarnbombed? Do you wish you could?