Knitting Battle: Gnomes vs. Snowmen! A ManMade Exclusive Interview with Anna Hrachovec

created at: 11/28/2011I was out at the American Folk Art Museum in Lincoln Center a few weeks back for their Make It Thursday event, and I got the chance to see Anna Hrachovec speak. For those of you who don’t know Anna’s work, she’s been knitting tiny toys for five years and runs the website Mochimochiland.com.
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She was at Make It Thursday talking about her most recent exhibition, Gnomes vs. Snowmen. I took the opportunity to swing by the exhibition, and to ask Anna a few questions.
1) Do you have any metrics on how much material you used for Gnomes vs. Snowmen? Feet of yarn, or number of yarn balls?
Let’s see.. I used about 64 skeins of green and white yarn to make the grass and snow, which was the part of the installation that I made using a knitting machine (like a sewing machine, except manual). All the rest of it – the gnomes, snowmen, trees, bunnies, etc – were hand knitted and didn’t actually use up that much yarn, but just hours and hours of knitting. Probably a good 500+ hours of knitting.

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2) Is knitting okay for men to do?
I’m pretty sure knitting is the new hipster guy trend – I heard that Sufjan Stevens does it, for a famous example. Most of the men I know would like to be like Sufjan Stevens. 

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3) You said that you were inspired, for Gnomes vs. Snowmen, by the Bayeux Tapestry. What else inspired you for this?
I more or less conjured up every violent Warner Bros cartoon and every vague memory of famous battles/wars that I could think of. I’m not so great with remembering the details of history, but the result of that is a fun mishmash of cliches, like a snowman getting tied to railroad tracks, a Trojan Carrot being rolled into Snowman territory, and a flattened gnome stuck to a giant snowball.  
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4) Do you do other DIY besides knitting?
Knitting has really consumed my life for the past five years. I try other things for a change sometimes, but I think I might be a little bit of a DIY disaster outside of knitting. 
created at: 11/28/2011