This Saturday (10 June 2023), visitors to Formby will find the village transformed with more than 150 colourful knitted and crocheted items decorating everything from bollards to post boxes to trees, arranged into around 40 different tableaux.
With snowmen and penguins outside Iceland, 20 bollards leading to Waitrose topped with woollen versions of goods on sale, from toothpaste to tea bags, and 11 knitted ladies taking part in a yoga class outside Formby Pool’s studio, the village will be transformed into a multi-coloured, woollen delight.
And that’s not to mention the reclining mermaid outside Formby Pool, three generations of a scarecrow family, a clanger and the soup dragon and a four-foot tall watchtower.
This explosion of creativity has been created for International Yarn Bombing Day by a small team of volunteers from Imagine Formby, a volunteer-led Community Interest Company (CIC) set up to revitalise Formby.
Imagine Formby Co-ordinator Leanne Jones said:
“This is the second year we’ve brought International Yarn Bombing Day to Formby. Our intention is to have some fun, to brighten up Formby Village and help remind people what a fantastic place it is to come and enjoy.
“Last year we had three or four volunteers who knitted and crocheted about 40 items. That was spectacular enough and caught people’s imaginations. This year we’ll have around 150 items made by a core group of six or seven of us who meet every month, with our efforts topped up with donations from other volunteers.
“This year we even have an international element, as a woman from upstate New York, called Doris Formby, saw last year’s fun on Facebook and wanted to get involved.
“We’ll be up at dawn on Saturday to make sure that the Village is fully decorated by the time the shops and cafes are open. We can’t wait and hope people will come and visit and enjoy what we have spent the last year creating, while seeing what Formby has to offer.”
Yarn bombing is the practice of adding knitted works of art to public places. For example, a yarn bomber may design some sort of colourful knitted pattern and wrap it around a bus stop. The aim of this practice was to try and take knitting from something that was viewed as merely for creating clothes and hats to something that could add meaning and colour to urban locations. International Yarn Bombing Day was first celebrated in 2011 and has been going strong ever since.
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