Masquerade: Graffiti Knitters Get Organized

Masquerade is a group of graffiti knitters based in Stockholm, Sweden. Their work basically embraces the same cozy Dadaism as Seattle's Knitta group, but these people have some serious organizational skills. They have produced a tourist map of their creations. If you click the image below, you can download it in PDF format.

That's not all. Masquerade has a blog, folks, and that blog has a Platial MapKit.

Knitta doesn't have a blog. Knitta is on MySpace, which has a "blog." MySpace blogs are basically like LiveJournal blogs without the random acts of censorship but with a lot of features that are unfriendly to linking in or communicating via. But I mean no disrespect, and here's why: Late last year, when Knitta started getting some serious press, other knitters started talking about contributing to Knitta's work in other cities. Here's what someone at Knitta wrote in the first of the three MySpace blog posts the group has ever posted:

There's no monopoly on knitting or graffiti. Anyone, anywhere, can do these things. We've only elevated a new trend of combining those two activities and given ourselves street names. This is definitely open to the public. We'd love to see other people tagging with knitted items! We think that'd be great!

Here's the sticky part though... We'd like for you to tag under your own unique crew name and individual tags. We'd rather reserve the name "Knitta" and the phrase "Knitta, Please" for ourselves. That's our crew and our motto. Just like graffiti crews everywhere, they all paint, but they all have different names. I think it would be amazing to see different "crews" popping up all over the world, installing little knitted hugs across their cities. Now, when you get "discovered" and start getting press, it'd be great if you threw a wink and a nod in our direction for the inspiration. I think that's fair. We'll nod right back, in the form of posting tag photos and letters you send to us on our website (as soon as we actually go live!). We can even have a list of crew names and locations, complete with photos, on a page - just like graffiti sites.

Two weeks later, Masquerade put up their first blog post.

[Via|Link]

Note: Hello to this post's many visitors. I have some updated information, some of the details you have just read are wrong, and I will be taking myself to the mat next week, so tune in then!