Knitting—once the epitome of sleepy grandmotherliness—is cool, and has been for a while. It's one of the major crafts powering the craft renaissance in hipsterdom, and it's spawned the practice of yarn bombing, a charming fusion of yang—the insouciant, insurgent spirit of graffiti—and yin: knitted cozies for trees and lampposts that look a bit like something Mum might cover her teakettle with. We've got our homegrown yarn bombers, of course, like Eric Rieger/ HotTea—who, despite his handle, doesn't craft cozies but rather tags chain-link fences with that handle, in yarn, and internationally.
    
But this coming Saturday, you're invited to take a step into the multicolored void beyond yarn bombing with one of the most colorful crafters in this, or any, town: StevenBe, aka Steven Berg, aka the "Glitter Knitter." His headquarters is an opulent yarn shop and knitting school on Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, a temple to knit-one-purl-two that is every bit as geeky about yarn (and if you read The Line, you know I mean "geeky" in the nicest possible way) as the edgiest coffee shop is about coffea-cherry processing or cupping techniques.
    
At 7 PM on Saturday, March 23, StevenBe is going  to go a little ways down the road to master photographer Wing Young Huie's Third Place Gallery at Chicago and 38th to present, in the words of the event's promotional materials, "a live-action knitting performance. The site-specific installation will feature Steven's wickedly playful sense of style and his collaborative, community-oriented approach to art and placemaking. Steven will discuss his creative process and his career in fiber art, which has encompassed both art and craft, corporate and artisan--and all of the fuzzy areas in between."

A Knitter at Eight
    
Sounds like Be/Berg will be knitting together elements of his life story--and it's quite a story. Taught by his mother to knit, he was already creating sequined gowns for neighbor girls' Barbie dolls at age eight. With a start like that, where do you go to college but those New York fashion-design behemoths, the Parsons School of Design and Fashion Institute of Technology? He then traveled the world as a high-end designer and buyer before ditching the corporate identity to return to hands-on fiber-artmaking and teaching in our very own backyard.

It's all a part of the amazing things that are going on at 38th and Chicago these days—powered by the placemaking consciousness of citizen-artists like Huie and Berg, as well as energized community groups like CANDO (see our coverage here) and enlightened developers like Mike Stebnitz, who's Huie's landlord at Third Place.

Community development that's fabulous--with sequins, even--is my kind of community development. Drop down to 38th and Chicago on Saturday to see how it's done.

StevenBe at the Third Place Gallery
March 23, 2013
7 PM
3730 Chicago Avenue South, Studio B
Minneapolis
Ping-pong and karaoke to follow