Graffiti knitting with Magda Sayeg: S&B Londoners guerrilla knit the South Bank

Friday the 20th of February. 10am. London’s South Bank. A gaggle of slightly nervous fledgling guerrilla knitters assemble in the Royal Festival Hall. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to yarn up the South Bank like it has never been yarned up before.

Armed with knitted strips, tubes, and squares, a pocketful of fat tapestry needles, and a bellyfull of knitting grrrrrrr S&B Londoners got their guerrilla knit on in the fine company of Magda Sayek, guerrilla knitting Queen and founder of Knitta Please, and Perri Lewis from the Guardian.

The lovely Miss Magda

Madga wears her S&B London badge with pride

From the Royal Festival Hall, where we put the finishing touches to our yarnbomb components, we took off for St Paul’s, adding woolly grafitti as we went.

Preparing for guerrillaness

The South Bank Skate Park

A wave of knitting rolled over the South Bank Skate Park as we wrapped a railing in our finest colours.

Woolly rail

Magda gives knitting love to a lonely bike lock

Stitching it up

S&B Londoners throw themselves into guerrilla knitting

Later in the day: all part of the scenery

The London Pride Statue and Laurence Olivier Statue

The chilly ladies of the London Pride statue caught our eye. The knitted bikini went down particularly well in the morning sunshine, and Sir Laurence got his leg warmed.

Dressing the ladies

Warmed leg

Two knitty ladies

Gabriel’s Wharf Sign Post

Magda stopped to knittify a signpost in the shadow of the OXO Tower. The rest of us stood look out. No signposts were harmed in the making of this graffiti knit.

Magda with Stitchettes Knitting Ninja and Deadly Knitshade

Climbing for her art

In the shadow of the OXO Tower

The Tate Modern Bollards

Very fitting that we made the outside of the Tate as arty as in the inside. The bollards lasted less than two hours. People had run off with two and unravelled half of one on the way back. Swines!

Tate bollards to you

Art in front of art gallery

Knightrider Street

Across the bridge and we were down to four guerrillas. Magda told us that guerrilla knitting was getting much more popular in Europe. She felt a bit like the knitting David Hasselhof. What better place to give a little yarn love then?

Knitrider

Colour co-ordinknition

St Paul’s Cathedral

St Paul’s was possibly our most controversial knit grafitti of the day. We pretty sure you’re allowed to do this to traffic beacon poles. But if anyone asks we were simply passing through when our knitting got frightened by a passing taxi horn and ran up the pole. What could we do?

Not stopping traffic, honest

Fabulous

All in all it was a yarn-tastic day. We’d like to thank Magda and Perri for approaching us with a tiny idea that we helped turn into a knitting day to remember.

For more takes on the day see blog posts of Purl Interrupted and Fingersandtoes. Hop along to the London: Guerrilla Knitting group on Flickr too.

We hope you’ll all join us  in making your outside world a little bit knitter too. We bet you’ve already got a couple of places in mind…