Projects

Filet Crochet Portraits

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Filet Crochet Portraits

Grief can be a slow, quiet, solitary process. Needle arts can be as well. Perhaps that’s why we’ve used crochet to process the recent loss of three beloved grandparents. First, Lorna created two Day of the Dead filet crochet banners to celebrate our maternal grandfather’s life and passing. Now, the two of us collaborated on a pair of filet crochet portraits in honor of our paternal grandparents, Robert and Catherine Watt. Both portraits are on view as part of the exhibit Thread Around Holes at The Lace Museum in Sunnyvale, California until October 31, 2015, after which they will be available for private viewings at Claremont Art Studios.

Filet Crochet Portraits by Jill and Lorna Watt

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New Products

Yarn Bombed Monster Chairs

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Yarn Bombed Monster Chairs

The question we most commonly got about our Buttmunches, the yarn bombed monster benches we did at San Francisco’s Ferry Building, was: Can I have one? So we said yes! Each meticulously handmade Buttmunch chair exhibited at Unleashed Art Gallery over the summer. The green chair is still available in the shop here. Contact us for a viewing at Claremont Art Studios or to discuss your idea for custom kids furniture or whimsical decor.

Yarn bombed monster chairs knit chairs knit bomb

Yarn bombed monster chairs knit chairs knit bomb

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Yarnbombs

GitHub Universe Yarn Bombed Benches

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GitHub Universe Yarn Bombed Benches

Despite much tension between art and tech in pricey Silicon Valley, an interesting symbiosis is also happening. Young professionals appreciate the art, especially street art, just as they appreciate good food, coffee, and barbering. The tech companies they build enact these values, engaging local artists to inspire their workforce.

“It’s a visual and a physical manifestation of what’s happening on the computers,” Bennett says. “You could just present your values on a piece of paper. But inviting a diverse group of independent artists to work alongside us is a more genuine expression of that creative process.” – Drew Bennett, artist.

We thrive on this symbiosis. As Bay Area natives, innovation and creation are inherent in us. Producing live installation art, knit props for events and advertising, and yarn bombed corporate art is our Silicon Valley version of Hollywood production. Ever since our childhood fantasies of conjuring characters in Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, we’ve always wanted to make new things with a team from one project to the next. What a ride!

Knit bench yarn bomb knit props GitHub1

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Projects, Yarnbombs

Oakland Coliseum String Art Yarn Bomb

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Oakland Coliseum String Art Yarn Bomb

How do you engage 25,000 people in one day? That was Visit Oakland‘s dilemma for the Oakland Raiders 2015 season opener at the Oakland Coliseum. Visit Oakland reached out to us to design a concept for both sides of the pedestrian bridge between the Coliseum and the BART rail station. Our guidelines: use this string art installation as our inspiration, maximize longevity, use Oakland’s team colors, use shapes that reference Oakland, add hashtags, and cover 150 feet over just two days.

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Yarnbombs

Rooty the Stilt-Walking Carrot Yarnbomb

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Rooty the Stilt-Walking Carrot Yarnbomb

We love inspiring people to make the world a sillier place. Last week we saw so many monster benches and monster feet on Instagram that we decided it’s time to bring a fun, new transformative concept to life. To brainstorm, we headed to an auspicious place to get our gears spinning: the park directly adjacent to the home of the original Maker Faire: Bay Meadows Park. A new park in a windy spot, all the trees are young with support poles. At first glance, this could pose a problem to the imagination, without any grand shapes in which to envision giant squid and palm trees. Instead of being deterred we embraced those skinny little trios of poles dotting the field. Within minutes, one cute, leafy tree top in particular sparked our make-believe session with visions of vegetables traipsing across the field. A few measurements later, and off to the studio we went to bring him to life. As always, here we post a bit of our process to inform your own yarn bombs. You’ll notice we’ve begun documenting the process with Snapchat. Follow our story to see what we get up to and show us your work too! (more…)

Tutorials

How to Make Fabric Yarn All in One Piece

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How to Make Fabric Yarn All in One Piece

So you want to repurpose some old sheets or fabric remnants, but all you can find on Pinterest are tutorials on how to make T-shirt yarn. You want to make yarn with no knots from a flat sheet of fabric, not a tube of fabric from a T-shirt. (The methods differ critically.) We had the same problem: for a recent installation of jumbo knit flags, we needed an efficient way to cut nearly a mile of fabric into 20 miles of yarn to knit on jumbo 1-inch diameter needles. We were surprised to find no best method. So, we improved on other techniques to get this efficient, knot-free technique that produces one continuous strand from extra large sheets of fabric. Let’s get started!  (more…)

Projects, Tutorials

Knit Pies for Pi Day 2015

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Knit Pies for Pi Day 2015

Knitters are nerds. Proof? Search nerd, geek, and math in Ravelry’s groups and find tons of chums hanging in places like GeekCraft, Geek Swap, and Botanica Mathematica. Needle crafters prove the old adage: if it exists, it’s been knit. So what knitter could let a once-in-a-century event like Pi Day 2015 pass them by? Pi Day 2015 is when the date and time 3/14/15 at 9:26 and 53 seconds lines up with the mathematical constant and irrational number of Life of Pi fame, 3.141592653…

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Projects

Repurposed Old Navy Yarnbomb

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Repurposed Old Navy Yarnbomb

If yarnbombing is a waste of time and materials, then why don’t aerosol artists get flack for not touching up house paint jobs instead of painting street walls? Because art. True, yarnbombing is more temporary and removable. But even Scotch Guarded yarnbombs don’t seem clean after a good wash and dry. Unless they’ve been indoors. And that’s just where our Old Navy truck yarnbomb was all through the holiday season. So when the Old Navy team asked us to repurpose the yarnbomb into memorabilia for the office, we put every usable scrap to work. (more…)