In May 2012, yarnbombers struck all across the front of the City Hall overnight, targeting bins, lamp-posts and the City Hall's iconic stone lions. The credit was claimed by a mysterious group called the Norfolk Ninja Knitters, who wanted to celebrate the Norfolk and Norwich Arts Festival. Sadly the knitted artworks were quickly removed by the council. Norwich resident and craft blogger Gran Plumley, aka Caroline Houghton, who took this photo, says: 'I thought it looked brilliant; very pretty. They certainly put a lot of work into what they do, especially the lions, getting all the spikes to match up and using different colours and textures of yarn - it must have taken hours of work. I'd like to think there is a little team of yarnbombers somewhere planning their next piece of street art...'

Photo: Caroline Houghton

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The pier at Saltburn, a seaside town in North Yorkshire, was transformed by a 50-metre scarf of knitted Olympic athletes in March 2012 - the knitted figures were busy doing everything from swimming to track events to weight-lifting. Hundreds of tourists flocked to the pier to see the spectacle. The identity of the yarnbomber remains gloriously unknown, but past yarnbombs in Saltburn town centre have also used scarves to great effect (such as a six-foot scarf with books attached to it left outside the town library) - and one was signed 'the Yarn Junki'. The search for the Yarn Junki continues...

Photo: Jules Style File

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You might have heard of guerilla knitter Deadly Knitshade, who runs knit graffiti blog Whodunnkit.com and, together with a team of other intrepid yarnbombers, has seized every opportunity to cover London with knitted art as part of collective Knit The City. Having yarnbombed phone boxes in London without permission before, when Deadly Knitshade was officially asked to decorate a London phone box to celebrate 25 years of Childline in the summer of 2012, she had great fun making an eight-foot knitted monster called 'Muncher' to live in Trafalgar Square for this 'warm and fuzzy' charity. 'It goes to show that woolly art installations are being taken a bit more seriously at last. Even when they are giant monsters,' says Knitshade (aka Lauren O'Farrell).

Photo: Deadly Knitshade/Whodunnkit

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The weather was typically grey and dreary, but the dedicated yarn bombers of Clitheroe, Lancashire, let nothing get in their way when it came to their plan to decorate their castle with wool and educate local schoolchildren about traditional crafting. Young people were taught to knit at local schools, and then asked to knit five-inch squares in any stitch or colour. The project culminated in August during Clitheroe's Torchlight Procession when the knitted squares were sewn together to accessorise trees, lamp posts, railings and sign posts around the Castle. Later, the knitted squares were taken down and sewn into blankets, then donated to charity.

Photo: Clitheroe Castle Museum

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To celebrate the arrival and stay of the Jamaican and American Olympic teams in the second city for London 2012, textile artist Sara Fowles and Stitches and Hos, a Birmingham-based knitting group, covered the lower columns on the exterior of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery with knitted graffiti. Over three months a pop-up shop in the Pavilions Birmingham shopping centre played host to knitters of all ages and abilities to make the piece for the K2TOG – Knit 2 Together project. It took 1,300 balls of wool, nearly 400 volunteer knitters and approximately 4,500 hours to make the vast installation.

Photo: Knit 2 Together

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What better way to celebrate Christmas than to adorn the local shopping centre's iconic Bull statue with knitted graffiti? That's what Sara Fowles of Stitches and Hos and her fellow yarnstormers did last December at Birmingham's Bullring. Sara had previously tried to yarnbomb the Bullring but security guards had forced her to leave, so she was delighted to be formally invited back by the shopping centre to decorate its famous Bull for Christmas. Having devised a pattern and ordered enough wool, they knitted over 12 square metres in three weeks.

Photo: Stitches and Hos

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Three enormous polystyrene lions standing 30 feet tall were crocheted over as one of 12 official artworks for the Cultural Olympiad. Unveiled in May 2012, the astonishingly detailed lions took 18 months to make - all by hand by artist Shauna Richardson. They used up 36 miles of wool from Swaledale sheep that graze in Derbyshire. The lions are on tour around the UK - you can see them at the Twycross Zoo in Warwickshire between 11 September and 21 December 2012. You can get involved with guerilla knitting through the Lionheart Project - click here for details.

Photo: Nick Hand

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Take a closer look at this bench - it's soft and covered in yarn! Artists Trevor Pitt and Kate Pemberton designed a pattern for knitting a bench (you can find the pattern at the bottom of the linked page) which is being used across the UK to make seating areas for public places. The idea is that the benches are used by knitters to sit down and share skills. Each bench is made using locally sourced wool and customised differently by the people who have made it. This one, for the Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, was made by a group of local knitters with Trevor Pitt, using wool from Somerset Jacob sheep, locally washed, carded and felted.

Photo: Trevor Pitt

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It seems nowhere in the country is safe from yarnbombers - up in remotest Orkney, in the town of Kirkwall, two anonymous yarn artists who go only by the names of Knitfish and Ripples the Crocheter have struck repeatedly. They have been busy this year cheering up trees and railings in the public area in front of the local library with bright knitted and crocheted decorations, making the region a crafty talking point - Orkney has been dubbed the yarnbombing capital of the north.

Photo credit: BBC Orkney

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To celebrate the BBC's 'Britain in a Day' project in March 2012, the yarnstorming collective Knit The City decided to 'try something a little different'. So they headed to Deptford, a market in south London, and let loose knitted artworks on the street walls, including this Banksy-esque knitted graffiti. Deadly Knitshade says that more and more yarnbombers across the country are getting imaginative in this way: 'It's so great seeing people use characters and themes instead of colourful cosies. I love how far outside the woolly box people are thinking.'

Photo credit: Deadly Knitshade/Knit The City

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