Photos: Yarn bombers hit Winspear Opera House in Dallas in dead of night

by Teresa Gubbins

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The grounds were covered in yarn for the imminent opening of the musical Hair.

Wednesday night, an army of knitters invaded the grounds of the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House where they wrapped trees, railings, and public benches in colorful sleeves of yarn. They hung knitted peace signs from the walkway rafters. They covered electrical switch boxes with shaggy knitted caps. When it got late, they gathered their skeins and needles, vowing to return again on Thursday.

They were engaged in yarn bombing, also known as yarn graffiti, wherein public spaces or objects are wrapped in yarn. Said to have originated in Houston in 2005, yarn bombing popped up in Dallas this spring, with colorful installations in Lakewood and East Dallas, including the Lakewood Library, Michael's on Greenville Avenue, and Good 2 Go Taco.

But this yarn bombing episode is a little more legit; it's at the behest of the Winspear, as an homage to the musical Hair, which opens on Tuesday. It'll be the biggest yarn bombing to hit Dallas -- so big that virtually every knitter in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is involved, says K Witta, the project's artistic director, who's overseeing the effort with Ronda Van Dyk, owner of The Shabby Sheep yarn store in Uptown.

"We're calling it the Yarn-In, like 'love-in'," Witta says.

Witta is Dallas' best-known yarn bomber, written about by the DMN, neighborsgo, Advocate, and more. She recruited her knitting group, dubbed the Knit Wits, to participate, while Van Dyk emailed everyone on her store's huge email list of knitters.

"The response was phenomenal -- we had over 70 knitters and crocheters on this project," Witta says. "People came out of the woodwork. This was Metroplex-wide, from Mansfield to Allen. They've been watching the yarn bombing going on all over the world, and were wanting to do it but were scared because it's usually illegal."

The group began meeting monthly to hammer out who would knit what and where.

"There were 32 trees, plus the bollards (fixed traffic barriers) and crocheted peace signs and flowers along the overhang, that's a lot to coordinate," she says. "The trees were by reservation only, because it's a bigger project that had to be thought through. People who didn't want that big of a commitment did covers for the bollards."

Anyone who wanted to participate, could -- they didn't screen anyone out. But everything was hush-hush.

"We kept it quiet," Witta says. "We code-worded it the 'Yarn-In' and asked everybody to keep it on the down low throughout the summer while we got it ready."

An arborist gave them the OK that the yarn sleeves wouldn't hurt the trees for the duration of the musical, which runs until October 2, at which point they'll take it all down. The installation is just about complete, but they'll be back on Thursday morning to apply finishing touches to their eye-pleasing, heartwarming patchwork of rainbow colors.

"When the Winspear asked us, at first we thought, 'Oh my God, we can't do this, it's such a huge undertaking'," Witta says. "But the more I thought about it, I said, 'How many lifetimes are you going to have to wait until somebody asks you to do something like this again?'"

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