Bus stop yarn-bombing will be dismantled, says Athens Transit director

A bus stop is the latest target in the mysterious yarn-bombings on Athens-Clarke County's eastside, but this time, the guerilla artwork will be coming down.

Some days ago, an Athens Transit bus shelter on Cedar Shoals Drive erupted in a vibrant display of orange and blue woven patches - and perhaps most tellingly, two bright orange paw-shaped yarn pieces on the shelter's back wall. The shelter is located almost directly across from Cedar Shoals High School, where the school colors are - you guessed it - orange and blue, and the mascot is - wait for it - a jaguar.

So, it's possible the yarn-bomber (or yarn-bombers) have some connection to the school, although Cedar Shoals High School Principal DeAnne Varitek, who hadn't yet seen the yarn-enhanced bus shelter when contacted Tuesday, discounted the notion that some of her students might be behind the artwork. Teenagers likely wouldn't have the time or the patience to do the kind of intricate work evident in the bus stop art, Varitek suggested.

It's possible though, she hinted Tuesday, that the colorful bus stop across the street from her school could help boost school spirit, which has been flagging lately, even as Cedar Shoals gets set to face Clarke Central High School next month in the annual cross-town rivalry football game.

Varitek was amused by the concept of yarn-bombing, and said she planned to check out the bus stop across from her school.

She'll have to hurry, though. Butch McDuffie, director of Athens Transit, said the installation will have to be dismantled,

"It looks kinda cool," said McDuffie, who received a picture of the decorated shelter from a route supervisor Tuesday morning. But, McDuffie said, the installation runs counter to local codes prohibiting the posting of posters and other items on bus shelters. He will keep the removed materials in a box at the Athens Transit office for whomever might want to claim them, he said.

"It's unique, it's fun - I'm good with that part of it," McDuffie said. And, he added, if the artist or artists had come to Athens Transit in advance, the yarn art might have been approved as a temporary installation under the transit system's Adopt A Stop program.

Yarn-bombing is a form of street art in which knitted fabric, or in some instances, just strings of yarn, are used to cover various objects in the environment. Yarn-bomb installations began popping up on the eastside in the first months of this year, as a phone booth at the corner of Lexington and Gaines School roads, a tree near a bus stop on College Station Road, a stop sign in the Georgetown Square shopping center off Barnett Shoals Road, and a spot near a bakery on Whitehall Road each were decorated with fabric patches or woven yarn.

The stop sign in Georgetown Square was made to look like a flower, with green yarn wrapped around the pole and formed into leaves, making the sign appear to be a bloom atop a fabric stem.

That bit of yarn-bombing art has remained undisturbed for months, but other pieces, like the quilt-wrapped phone booth, have succumbed to natural and other forces. The phone booth art came down as the tract on which it was located was being cleared for a new gas station and convenience store.

The Cedar Shoals Drive bus stop was the first new yarn-bombing to appear in some time, and the phenomenon, however short-lived its latest manifestation may be, continues to delight Athens-Clarke County Commissioner Andy Herod, whose eastside district has hosted many of the installations.

"The appearance of another piece of yarn public art just shows how cool the eastside is," Herod said, "and that it is full of wonderfully creative people who want to brighten the everyday spaces in which eastside residents live, work, play, and interact with one another.

"If you will pardon the pun," Herod continued, "such artwork adds to the fabric of our lives by brightening the visual landscape and encouraging us to see things in new and different ways."

But, just as with the earlier yarn-bombing incidents, Herod says he has no idea who, or how many people, might be behind the installations.

It's also a mystery to Cara Cannon, one of the owners of Revival Yarns, a shop in the Bottleworks on Prince Avenue that sells knitting and crocheting supplies and offers space for fiber artists of all skill levels to work on their creations.

Occasionally, Cannon said, someone will come into the shop talking about a yarn-bombing. Cannon said she enjoys hearing the stories, and joked that if she did know who was doing it, she "probably wouldn't" tell anyone.

"I think it's a really cool thing," Cannon said.