Last week, M saw it first and handed me the paper: close to where we live women are beautifying a long abandoned water well by lining it with blankets – crocheted or knitted – in all shades of blue and green. Due until early September for a festival weekend. Yarn and fellow campaigners much needed.

Did I have a choice? I guess not and off I went … only to get there the wrong day (flaky me).

However, Thursday I would go again and there they were: Amy Klement – an American living in Berlin, performance and visual artist, initiator of the whole project – and six ladies of different age and nationality under a huge yellow umbrella.

Soon, I learned that not only blankets for the water well were needed but also cloths to cover bicycle racks and tubes to mantle bollards. Luckily, I had brought knitting needles and acrylic yarn, one of the garden chairs was empty and in no time I sat knitting just like everyone else.

Every now and then, passers-by would stop to talk about or to take pictures of what we were doing. A lady would bring huge bags of yarn, attached to both sides of her bike’s handle bar and eventually a man would deliver two bollard covers his mother had made, decorated with crocheted flowers and butterflies. He must have been in his 40s (at least! Probably older) and I would muse for a while (who or) what made the old lady knit for bollards.

Coming home that day, I would call my mother (she is in her late 70s) suggesting she might join in and knit rectangles that I would sew around bike racks in early September. Well, she was surprised (to say the least) but pleased to take part in an arts project :). My mother never fails to surprise me. She is in for all sorts of stuff. The thought of her, telling friends (and my dad!) that she is now knitting for a yarn bombing still makes me laugh.

Unfortunately, I have been pushing too hard to finish some crochet projects lately (a mystery CAL on a German blog; more soon) at the expense of my right thumb, to be precise: to the expense of the Metacarpophalangeal joint. No idea how to pronounce that, I did not even know I had one of those, I can feel it now though …

The hand is bandaged and I promised not to crochet for a while (how long is “a while”??). No one mentioned knitting though and so I keep knitting water. Row by row, very slowly, trying not to overstrain any of my fingers or joints. Quite a ruminant experience.

A lovely weekend to all of you!