By Carla Zanoni
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
INWOOD — Washington Heights residents marveled at subway turnstile adorned with handmade cozies last week.
Now, Inwood residents are getting in on some of their own fiber art love, enjoying a stretch of colorful yarn graffiti that adorns a bend of fencing outside Inwood Hill Park.
As of last week, a five-foot scroll of yarn work, which matches the autumnal colors of the park, has decorated part of the fencing around a western portion of the park at Indian Road near Seaman Avenue.
Intended to coincide with the first annual International Yarnbombing Day on June 11, the Hanselmann Davies family collaborated on the project for weeks after 50-year-old Julie Hanselmann Davies hatched the idea after reading about the knitting movement.
"I love when people take mundane urban space and make it something creative and a personal expression," she said. "We just made a nice little interruption in the city.”
"I'm hoping other knitters will come along and get into it,"she added. "It's just another thing I can do to make the city a little more cheerful.”
A knitting novice, Hanselmann Davis recruited family members to knit stretches of the panel, leaning heavily on support from her "expert knitter" mother-in-law, Eileen Thomas Davies, who was visiting from England during the Memorial Day weekend.
"She's a speed knitter, I've never seen someone knit so fast in my life," Hanselmann said.
She also recruited her cousin Ryan Aixa Shantz, who lives in Virginia, and her 7-year-old son, James, to help bring the project together.
"It was really fun, I had a great time learning to knit and teach family about the city and projects like these," she said, adding that her son is "very handy with these kinds of things" and races home to see the artwork every day.
For many Inwood residents, making sure the artwork is still up is part of the marvel of the yarnbomb.
"The yarn bomb is still there after the rain yesterday on 214th Street between Seaman and Indian Road," tweeted Inwood resident Cletusrayray. "Cool."
