While I’ve featured knit deer heads, DIYs on how to knit your own pouf, and photos of rogue knitting and crochet projects, I have yet to feature a truly large-scale fiber arts project. That is, until now.
Kate Pokorny, who’s worked in fiber arts for many years, is preparing to crochet a house – a yurt, to be exact. Kate started crocheting small dome shapes, and then realized that she could translate the small shapes into a much larger one, and decided to make a crocheted yurt. (Yurts are traditional Mongolian nomadic homes that are dome-shaped.)
Kate began crocheting about four years ago, and since then her needlework ambitions have soared. In part, she notes that she was inspired by Margaret Wertheim’s TED Talk and saw how crochet can be used to represent hyperbolic space and coral reefs, and became very interested in oversize knit and crochet work by artists like Kwangho Lee, Claudy Jongstra, and Christien Meindertsma.
Kate will start “building” her yurt as soon as the weather gets warmer at her parents’ farm in Jaffrey, NH, and hopes to complete it by this Autumn. Kate notes, “This past weekend I sourced the rest of the wool for the project from a Mack Hill Farm, a farm about 45 minutes away from my place, and now I’m starting the process of getting it all cleaned and blended so that I can begin hand felting the two-inch diameter cord and crocheting it using my arm as the ‘hook.’ If all goes according to plan it will be self-supporting and made of a single cord.”
To hear more about the plans for the yurt, and to check out some photos, read more.
When I asked Kate about the plans for the yurt after it’s completed, she said, “When it’s done I have dreams that it’ll go to textile exhibits all over, that people will want to see how it was made and learn about the community that developed around it – so far everyone I’ve talked to to that end though wants to see if it will work! I can’t blame them. Regardless of if it goes on a tour of schools that help out in the process or textile centers, galleries or museums, though, there will definitely be a party when it’s done! The farm has much to do at it including swimming and a big pizza oven so I imagine a big ‘to do’ with the yurt as the center – it will be a longtime coming when it’s complete! My brother also gave me electro luminescent wire to weave into the inside when it’s done so we can party into the night!”
If you want to donate to her project, you can do so here. Find out all the details about her project at Yurt Alert. I can’t wait to see the final result!
