Warming the cold balls of Haarlem

Article Added: 28/01/2010 11:40:45
This week Netherlands-based artist Connie Lene got in touch with HotHive Textiles to show us some pictures of her knitted graffiti, which we couldn’t resist sharing with you. Danish born Connie, who was brought up in New Zealand, has been knitting since the 1950s and when out on a cold winter’s day in her home town of Haarlem, she saw something in much need of one of her warm hats.

Connie explains, “I was wandering around town with my best beloved on a freezing, bitter, bleak and cold day and saw all the magnificent balls lining the side of the Grote Markt the big town square of Haarlem. I started viewing my environment with the thought of how could I artistically enhance it however temporarily.”

With the thought in mind Connie went home and rummaged through her yarn stash with the idea of knitting one of the balls a large hat to keep it warm on the freezing nights. Connie spent several evenings visiting the market to check the measurement of the hat and once it was ready she set off to install it.

Connie continues, “We walked to the Grote Markt town square with the finished piece, threaded needle and scissors. We had already chosen our ball – it was to be number 13 in the beautiful line of 25 – however when we arrived at the spot another ball beckoned so that became ‘the ball’. And then the fun started. Would people stop us Would they look at us Would they photograph us Would they wrestle us to the ground
Nothing happened – it was as normal an activity as any other, it seems. But I had made a fundamental error – that is, when I was at the cast off row on the knitting it was still too tight to get over the ball. So, I did what no knitter would ever do. I snipped the cast off edge in a number of places to see if we could stretch the knitted art graffiti over the ball.

Nope.

So we took it off and went to a local café to recover, warm up and work out what to do now. Once the hands and body were warm again I sat in the bar and I unpicked the cast off edge and caught each stitch with the yarn. I stretched it as far as the knitting could stretch and sewed in the end of the yarn.

Back to the ball.

This time it went over – it was a tight fit, but it was always the intention that this ball cover would fit well. But it was even colder by then – maybe -2 or -3 – with a real feel of my fingers are going to get frostbite and fall off and a fear that I will never be able to knit again. And the ball was really icy cold. But, I still needed to sew the join from the bottom to the middle section. The ground was icy cold as well and covered with snow – the only way was to lie over the ball and stitch from the bottom up. But my hands were so frozen that I could not manipulate the needle and thread and it was impossible to do it with big gloves on. Common sense prevailed and we left the seam unstitched.

Next morning I went back to stitch the seam, if I had the courage, and there the ball was without its beautiful designer coat. We do know that a young couple took a photo while we were installing the warmer and maybe they have a really good picture of this piece of graffiti – which did no harm, didn’t damage anything and did warm a frozen Haarlem Ball however briefly.”

We would love to hear from you if you have any similar stories of textile art graffiti or if you want to add your comments to Connie’s tale. You can tell us what you think by logging into the site and using the comment forms below.