The “Hatting” of the Clock: Crafting Juniata’s Knitting Community through Yarn Bombing the Clock Tower

Abstract

This piece explores how knitting creates community. We’ve found that the materiality of knitting, by which we mean the physical making of knitted objects, creates a feeling of community that connects people across physical and digital spaces. We discuss how the authors’ personal knitting experiences with a college knitting club and yarn bombing the clock tower on campus relate to theory about the materiality of making knitted things. We argue that crafted rhetorical actions such as the yarn bomb enable knitters and non-knitters to connect more broadly around central community spaces.