The "Hatting" of the Clock: Crafting Juniata's Knitting Community through Yarn Bombing the Clock Tower

Authors

Hannah Bellwoar, Juniata CollegeFollow
Scarlett Berrones, Juniata CollegeFollow

Abstract

This piece explores how knitting creates community. We've found that the materiality of knitting, by which we mean the physical making of knitted objects, creates a feeling of community that connects people across physical and digital spaces. We discuss how the authors' personal knitting experiences with a college knitting club and yarn bombing the clock tower on campus relate to theory about the materiality of making knitted things. We argue that crafted rhetorical actions such as the yarn bomb enable knitters and non-knitters to connect more broadly around central community spaces.

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About the Author(s)

Hannah Bellwoar is an Assistant Professor of English at Juniata College. In addition to knitting, she enjoys crochet, spinning, and cross-stitch. She loves knitting socks especially, showering approximately 150 pairs on friends, family, and perfect strangers. She collects yarn wherever she or her knitting proxies go, including Alaska, Hawaii, the Florida Keys, Hungary, and the Philippines. She suggests you can tell a lot about the local culture by the kind of yarn they have, so wherever you travel, scope out the local yarn stores first!

Scarlett Berrones is an undergraduate student in Multimedia Communication at Juniata College. If there’s anything you need to know about her, it’s that she spends way more time looking for patterns to knit than she spends actually knitting. Hats and monsters are her specialty, but she loves an occasional scarf or pair of socks. She is endlessly searching for opportunities to include knitting in her daily activities, schoolwork, and multimedia projects to show this craft's significance in every aspect of life.

DOI

10.15760/harlot.2015.14.10

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39486

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Bellwoar, Hannah and Berrones, Scarlett (2015) "The "Hatting" of the Clock: Crafting Juniata's Knitting Community through Yarn Bombing the Clock Tower," Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion: No. 14, 10.
https://doi.org/10.15760/harlot.2015.14.10