a mushroom chronicle, part 1

My yarn bombing activity started out as a solitary preoccupation. Then in January a neighbor brought me an e-mail he had received about Yarn Bombing Los Angeles' group project of covering the facade of a museum with 5" granny squares. This neighbor suspected I would be interested, because one of my first yarn bombs (a crocheted street-light pole cozy) has been hanging in front of his home for almost two years.

So it was that I started crocheting 5" granny squares in the prescribed colors of purple, yellow, white, and hot pink. The design's range was broader than that, but these were the colors of yarn I had on hand. Other crocheters would come up with the lime green, bright blue, and orange squares to complete this design:

I delivered my 35 squares to Los Angeles' Craft and Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) on the third Saturday of February and spent a pleasant afternoon sewing squares together into monochromatic blocks of nine. Of the 15 or so people gathered around a table in the museum's back room, almost half were college students of both sexes: members of classes in fiber arts or fabric design, some of whom had never held a tapestry needle (the tool of choice for assembling crocheted or knitted pieces).

On the third Saturday of March, I returned to CAFAM to sew alternating-colored blocks of nine, together with contrasting blocks of two and nine, into larger blocks representing traditional multi-colored granny squares (like the pieces between the upstairs windows in the picture above).

So what does this have to do with mushrooms?

I came home from CAFAM feeling that I, after hanging out with fiber artists, might be a fiber artist myself. I picked up some yarn left over from a hat I'd knitted, and quickly crocheted a realistic mushroom -- freehand and asymmetrical -- about three inches tall. Steve made a wire support that would stick into the ground and hold the mushroom upright with a coil in its cap and a spike in its stem. Under cover of darkness, I took the mushroom next door and planted it under a neighbor's chocolate-berry bush:

See a mushroom chronicle, part 2.