IDEAS Magazine

What if?

William Micou and Anna Prescott cover Winchester Cathedral in wool.


Yarn bombing is a blooming form of street
art started in 2005 by Madga Sayeg, from
Houston, when she covered the door
handle of her boutique with leftover
knitting projects. It has since gone viral,
with features in public places yarn-bombed
all around the world. Cars, bikes, and trees
have all been done. We need something
more original. What about the Winchester
Cathedral?
Simplifying the shape of the cathedral to
two bricks, and using the dimensions
found from a reproduced ancient
manuscript with a hand-drawn scale, we
get an external surface area of about 28000
m
2
. This is the same area as about 4
Stamford Bridge football pitches.
The yarn we are using has a mass of
0.25/m
2
, so well need seven metric
tonnes. If one sheep gives us 4 kilos, well
need 1750 sheep. This is 0.016% of the
sheep in Wales, but only 0.0058% of the
sheep in New Zealand. If each sheep were
1 metre tall, we could have a 1750 metre
sheep stack. This is about the height of 2
Burj Khalifas put on top of one another
(828 metres each.)
Well be making our material with the
Tunisian crochet stitch, because it is one of
the easiest and fastest forms of knitting.
Since this wont need to keep anyone
warm, our bres will be meshed together
with 5 stitches per square inch, or 7750
stitches/m
2
. Using a 4.2mm needle a
professional knitter (this is a thing?) can
make one stitch per second. That means it
takes 7750 seconds to make 1m
2
of fabric,
which is just over 2 hours. Therefore, to
make our 28000m
2
, it would take 56000
hours of non-stop professional crocheting.

However, 2000 sleepless days of
crocheting at record pace would make our
kniffiti laughable it must be done
overnight. If we take a night as being 8
hours, it would take 8=7000
people to yarn-bomb the cathedral.

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