Knotty Harts

“It’s a homemade reminder that laughing is contagious, kindness is cool, and there’s always hope.”

—Knotty Harts

If you’ve spent any time on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the past three years, you may have encountered an unexpected riot of color in one public locale or another: a jaunty yarn whale with the message “Whale Done” at the Long Beach Harbor; yarn pizza slices near a pizza joint in Gulfport, with the slogan “You Can’t be Topped”; a flush of multicolored toadstools on a fence in Bay St. Louis asserting “There’s Mushroom to Grow”;  a Volkswagen, in yarn, mysteriously appearing in downtown Pass Christian just before the annual Cruisin’ the Coast antique car festival declaring “You’re a Classic”.

These arresting bursts of optimism are the work of one anonymous yarn-bomb street artist (and the help of their friends) who goes by the name Knotty Harts.

The concept’s origins go back to the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Knotty”, who’d been crocheting as a hobby for about fifteen years, was looking for an outside-the-box way to uplift their community. “Years before, I’d seen trees wrapped with yarn in Jacksonville,” they said. “I thought it was cool and something I might like to try some day.”  

Around that time, Knotty heard about a challenge from New York City  “yarn bomber” London Kaye, who’d gained national notoriety creating crochet street art in Brooklyn. “She called for others to do a month of yarn bombing in their cities, one piece every day for thirty days,” Knotty recalled. After months of preparation, over the course of October 2020, Knotty then anonymously hung thirty-one signs with funny—punny—messages across the Gulf Coast.

Three years and hundreds of yarn bombs later, Knotty Harts has continued to spread their simple message, “Be happy. Be well,” across five countries and twenty U.S. States—delivering it through whimsical, eye-catching pictures and playful puns entirely illustrated in yarn. Knotty is the first to admit their yarn-bomb pieces can be considered cheesy, and will gladly take all the smirks, groans, and eyerolls for the sake of making one person laugh. And if it gets people talking (or sharing on social media), even better.

“I started at a time when many of us were depressed because we couldn’t do the things we wanted to do,” they said. “But most of us could go for a walk. I used my yarn to try to make those walks a little brighter, for my own mental health as much as anything.” They sign each piece “knotty harts” and set up Facebook and Instagram accounts in that name. It didn’t take long before both accounts were receiving messages from strangers thankful for the bright spots they'd created in their day. Some were even moved to make donations of yarn or money, so Knotty could continue their work.

It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, though. Yarn bombing is technically considered graffiti, so some have treated Knotty’s art as a criminal act, in which cases the installations have been confiscated and destroyed by city officials. Ultimately, they've come to terms with this ephemerality with a conviction that if one person had the chance to see and enjoy their work before it was taken down, then they've done their job. On to the next piece. More often than not, officials have turned a blind eye.

Knotty has also had people admit to taking some of their pieces for themselves and putting them on display in their backyard or living room. This doesn’t bother them either. “I’m just glad they loved it enough to take it,” they said. “And maybe it’s providing hope to their friends and family.”

Each Knotty Harts installation represents hours of work crocheting each different element, then incorporating it into the larger design. Depending on the details, a single piece can take anywhere from five hours to eighty hours. Then, Knotty must install it in absolute anonymity—which means sneaking around between midnight and 5:00 am, stopping whenever a car or pedestrian passes and might spot them, and disappearing before anyone knows they were there.

“When I started, I was hanging each element separately, which took hours in the middle of the night,” Knotty said. “But I’ve figured out how to affix everything to garden netting first. Even that can take five to six hours. But that allows me to go to my new location and put it up in two or three minutes. So, there’s less chance of getting caught.”

Knotty’s largest installation to date was a massive rainbow constructed of individual yarn flowers. Commissioned by a downtown business to cover the entire side of their building, the “mural” was eight feet wide and took six months to crochet, flower by flower, then days more to turn those flowers into the rainbow. Some of the other installations go up annually for a specific holiday, then come down and are stored until the next year. Or they may be taken apart and the pieces incorporated into a new installation to be displayed in a different town. “Sometimes I just pass a spot and think, ‘That spot needs a yarn bomb,’” Knotty said. “Then, I start thinking about what should go there.”

On a couple of occasions, Knotty has even been able to stand by and witness someone discovering one of their pieces. “That’s a great feeling to watch from afar and see someone else appreciate my work,” they said.

Every couple of months, they compile a spreadsheet of fifty pieces that—to their knowledge—are currently on display. They post the list on their Instagram account and invite people to put away their cell phones, hop in a car, and go on a yarn-art scavenger hunt together. See how many you can find. Take selfies with them. Laugh at the cheesy puns. And take pleasure in knowing a total stranger has put such effort into making you feel good, even if for just a moment. •

Follow @knottyharts on Instagram or Facebook to access the most up-to-date spreadsheet, and keep up with the artist’s work.