Yarn Bombing & Post-Box Bonnets

Now a strange story and the possible start of a new folklore trend. It all started last week when I was in my local town of Bungay – home of the demon dog Black Shuck – in Suffolk when I spotted that a postbox had been adorned with a hand knitted Easter bonnet – yes a woolly hat for a piece of street furniture. Imagine a giant tea cosy. I thought it was merely the work of a solitary local eccentric but when I posted this up on the Folk Horror Revival Facebook Group I was surprised to see it was a nationwide - if not international - phenomenon. And it is not just postboxes but also parking bollards and apparently even whole lamp-posts. 

There's a postbox in Colchester (England) that gets a new seasonal themed bonnet for Halloween, Christmas and Easter. An American contact says she's seen entire lamp-posts kitted out with knitted/crocheted scarves. And there's apparently a whole bus shelter in Brighton that's been similarly decorated.

Yarn Bombing it's called and it seems to have taken off as a pastime at the start of the first Covid lockdowns during the spring of last year with the intention of cheering people up. 

So we'll done clandestine groups like the Knitting Nannas of South Wales and the Prosecco & Purls (that's Purls as in knitting not the ones you find in oysters) group in Caerleon, also in Wales, for brightening up our streets and making us smile.

​And of course for providing future generations of folklore academics and students of urban legends with something to research and present conference papers on when they contemplate the cultural significance of and connection between Covid, lockdown, postbox cosies and yarn bombing.