‘Yarn bombing’ finds a home at Niceville Library

In Brief:

🧶 Joilyn Ryerson led Niceville’s first public “yarn bombing” art installation at the local library, bringing together contributions from across the country.
📍 The colorful fiber art display includes hundreds of handmade crochet and knit pieces wrapped around pillars at the library entrance.
📚 Ryerson, a certified crochet instructor, offers classes at the Niceville Library and hopes the project inspires wider interest in fiber arts.

After months of planning, hours of stitching, and a long day of hard work, Joilyn Ryerson’s dream exploded into reality Saturday at the entrance to the Niceville Public Library.

“Exploded,” that is, with the installation of what is believed to be the first public “yarn bombing” by local fiber artists.

Yarn bombing? Fiber artists? While these terms might not be familiar to most people in the area, they’re at the heart of Ryerson’s passion for crocheting, knitting, and other art forms that utilize fibers such as yarn as their media. Yarn bombing is simply a unique type of art installation that displays the work of fiber artists in a public setting. While popular in Europe and in larger American cities, the practice is less known in Northwest Florida.

Ryerson is hoping to change that.

“I’m excited to get people to open their eyes to the beauty of this type of art,” she said. “Maybe they’ll want to learn more about fiber arts and give them a try themselves.”

Ryerson came up with the idea of staging a yarn bombing shortly after she began offering crochet classes at the library earlier this year. In April, she put out a flier inviting local fiber artists to contribute handmade items to the effort.

“I was totally amazed by the response,” Ryerson said. “I spread the word through Facebook and other crochet groups that I belong to, and the community just really stepped up. In addition to local artists, we received items from as far away as Philadelphia and Tampa. I was so excited to see that members of the Fiber Arts Club at Niceville High School contributed, too.”

By the time the contribution deadline arrived on June 20, Ryerson had received hundreds of individual items stitched in different geometric shapes. While most of the pieces are squares, the collection includes circles, triangles, rectangles and hexagons in just about every color of the rainbow.

The unexpected bounty of pieces translated into a monumental task for Ryerson and her band of volunteers, who spent hours sewing the different pieces together to form large sections for the display. Once the sections were finished, Ryerson’s team began hanging them from the four large pillars near the entrance to the library.

“We had a lot of people ask us what we were doing as we were performing the installation,” Ryerson said. “It was so wonderful to see the effect it’s already having on our community.”

Ryerson hopes that one of those effects will be an increased interest in traditional arts such as knitting and crochet.

“I taught myself to crochet when I was 12, and to knit when I was 15,” said Ryerson, who is an Air Force veteran as well as a military spouse. “I earned my Craft Yarn Council certification as a crochet instructor about a year ago, and when we moved to Niceville I began teaching at the library. I’m a mom to two boys who have no desire to learn how to crochet, so it gives me great joy to be able to teach other people.”

Due to the huge response to Ryerson’s request for contributions of handmade items, she intends to expand the yarn bombing to the interior of the library as well. She believes the outdoor display will stay up “for as long as the weather allows.”

“Doing something like this has been on my bucket list for a while,” she added. “It was a lot of work, but I’m just overwhelmed to see my vision become a reality. I’m so grateful to the volunteers who worked so hard and so amazed by how the community came together.”

For more information about Ryerson’s crochet classes, email her at brightenadaycrochet@gmail.com.