Knitted Billboard Vinyl Drapes for SFMOMA Event

Globally renowned luminaries convened for an evening event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on September 12, 2018. We partnered with Raiola Co. Event Design to hand knit a large 10- x 40-foot drape screen.

Our task was to create a focal point using a sustainable material in line with the event’s sustainable ethos, which excluded new plastic serveware, serving meat, and more. After researching recycled yarn and textiles, the idea sparked to repurpose used local billboards from California.

We hand cut over two dozen 6- x 12-foot billboards into 1.5″ strips using the technique we developed for cutting fabric into one long, knot-free strip. That’s over half a mile of strips!

Constructed as four 10- x 10-foot panels on 1.5-inch PVC pipe “knitting needles”, we keep them in the studio to reuse for jumbo knitting projects.

This process is one we previously developed to make 350 feet of hand knitted flags for Old Navy’s flagship stores.

The entire project took over 60 hours to prototype, design, source, knit, install, break down, and package for reuse.

Knitting details for nerds:

The drape is stockinette, knitted flat.
To hide the upper pipe, we increased every stitch on the last round.
In order to use the last row of stitches as loops for hanging the drape, instead of binding off we put them on hold by threading the live stitches with a strip of vinyl tied to the first and last stitch.
Instead of mattress stitching panels together as one, we left them as four separate panels for ease of storage and zip tied them together when hung.
Each panel packed up into a 2- x 2- x 2.5-foot bundle weighing about 30 pounds.

For more examples of our work, see our portfolio.

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