Imagine walking into a colorfully immersive environment made entirely of fiber, exploding with vibrancy and texture. As you walk from room to room, new adventures await you in art installations you can’t help but sink your hands, and mind, into. 

The Craft Yarn Council is excited to announce a new partnership with Dallas’ premiere experiential art exhibit, Sweet Tooth Hotel, to bring an immersive fiber experience to audiences across the country. The new installation, titled “Intangible,” opened June 2020. 

“Intangible” showcases an all-female lineup of some of the top fiber artists from around the United States, including yarn-bomb extraordinaire London Kaye (Los Angeles, CA), Fiber Artist Niki Dionne (Dallas, TX), Muralist and Illustrator Alli Koch (Dallas, TX), Fiber Artist Jackie Lawrence (Denton, TX), Installation Fiber Artist and Yarn Bomber Hannah Busekrus (Austin, TX), Crochet Designer Twinkie Chan (San Francisco, CA), Textile Designer Molly Sydnor (Dallas, TX), Dallas Yarn Bomber Co-Founder Sally Ackerman (Dallas, TX), Knit Artist Joanna Lin (Dallas, TX) and Embroidery Artist Kara Herman (Denton, TX). Each artist has been given a dedicated space to create their own whimsical world completely made from fiber and are the first cohort for CYC AIR (Craft Yarn Council Artist-In-Residence program). 

Since each of the artists used large quantities of yarn for their installs, we wanted to do a special series of Happy Place blog posts to dive into how each of them stored and organized their yarn. Read on for our CYC AIR Happy Place with Hannah Busekrus of Hanasaurusrex and /h//s/r/ textiles! Hannah is a fiber artist, yarn bomber, illustrator and all around awesome person who was part of our Humans That Yarn campaign! 

 

 

How many skeins of yarn did you receive for your Sweet Tooth Hotel installation?

Over 1,100.

 

What brand and fiber content did you use in your installation?

I used acrylic yarns from Red Heart Super Saver, Red Heart Soft and Caron One Pound

 

What colors did you use for your installation?

I used 27 colors in my installation. I used really bright and fun colors and all but three of them were Red Heart Super Saver. 

 

 

What system did you use to organize your CYC AIR yarn for Sweet Tooth Hotel?

I started out stacking all that had arrived (3 shipments of around 200 skeins each) against the wall, by color, in my dining room. I made a "frame" out of all the Poly-fil boxes also living in that space (24 ten lb. boxes) and then filled the space inside with all the yarn. It was kinda awesome... but also kind of structurally unsound, haha! About half of it came tumbling down a day or so later. I didn't have time to reorganize it all pretty, so all the fallen skeins just got thrown up on top of the ones still stacked.

 

What furniture or storage systems did you use to organize the yarn you received?

I used any space I could find! Some of my nice hand-dyed yarns are in pretty baskets or in little shelf "hammocks" from Ikea that fit their Kallax shelf system, but I notoriously have more yarn than space, like always... so all the craft acrylic I use for yarn bombing and quick projects live in lawn size garbage bags in the spare room. There are boxes here and there with yarn shipments still in them. I use a lot of Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, so it's everywhere. I was using an old vintage dresser to organize it by color, but then I got busy with projects/work and ended up using a lot of it. I bought more, but it hasn't made it back into an organized state yet.

Since I've started creating punch needle jewelry, I now have a lot of recycled cashmere and more hand-dyed fingering weight wools. Those live in every nook and cranny of the space surround my comfy Poang chair in the living room. This is where you can find me fiber working or pleasure knitting/crocheting when I'm not tufting. Oh gosh... all the yarn for the tufting. I started a new wall-o-yarn in my garage studio for all that yarn.

 

Do you or have you ever found it difficult to manage or organize your yarn?

YES! I dream of a day when I will have a dedicated space to work in large enough to not only contain my current yarn hoard but all the new yarn babies I am certain to adopt in the future.

 

 

 

 

Knowing the amount of yarn you were going to receive, how did you find an organization system that worked for you?

We rearranged our dining room/kitchen, moving the dining room table into the center of the kitchen. We also cleaned out the garage and set up my studio. Yarn lives against the dining room wall, coned up in the garage or still in the box it came in. That's about as organized as I could get with 1100+ skeins moving in.

 

How do you like to de-stash?

What is de-stash? Haha I tend to keep all my yarn. I like having yarn on hand for whatever ideas come to me when they come.

 

Do you work in the same space where your yarn is stored? Why or why not?

Yes. I started a new textile biz and currently work from my home studio. It isn't my most preferred way to work. Working from home can easily blur the line between work and life outside of work for me. I would much prefer to work from a separate studio... but baby steps.