Part two of “meet our volunteers,” a series highlighting the Austin community crafters who are making A Knitted Wonderland happen.
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Meet Clara Bogard (right), a 5th grader, Amelia Long (left), in 6th grade, and tree cozy #48 made of Fibonacci sequenced stripes. The girls are students at the Girls’ School of Austin and members of the Knitty Gritties, an after-school knitting club. As the two most advanced knitters of the group, they were given the chance to design and create this project, with only a little help from their sponsors. Amelia says her favorite thing about the project was experimenting with the colors in the sequence. She also learned how to purl! Both Clara and Amelia plan to be on site Friday for the installation, and they can’t wait to see their finished product lined up with the rest of Austin’s knit community.
The group formed in fall 2010 and has grown from 3 girls to 10 students total, ranging from 2nd to 7th grades. Sponsor Liberty Heise notes that the group seems to transcend the normal social order of a school, with special friendships reaching across age divisions. Some of the girls were already seasoned knitters (Amelia has been knitting since she was 8), but others have learned to knit since joining the group. Knitted Wonderland is the group’s first large-scale project – but just wait, Liberty warns, “We are planning to knit bomb our own campus soon after UT.”
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A Knitted Wonderland will be on exhibit March 5-18, 2011, in the Blanton’s Faulkner Plaza. The project is in collaboration with UT’s Blanton Museum of Art, coinciding with their latest exhibit Recovering Beauty and UT’s annual open house, Explore UT. Come out to see the installation and hear Magda Sayeg, founder of Knitta, speak on Saturday, March 5th.
In the meantime, visit the project’s Facebook page and read about it over here at the Statesman.
Knitta + Magda Sayeg 