The yarn bombers at work. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi; click to enlarge)

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

In the craggy moments just after dawn Saturday, when not much was moving except bleary-eyed bakers and the  innards of a nearby traffic light, three women sat on a bench outside Fair Haven’s River Road Books, each with a somewhat mischievous smirk on her face, knitting.

The women — two from Fair Haven and the third from Middletown — were in the beginning stages of what was a well-planned sort of guerrilla art project, a stealth mission that toed a fine line between public art and vandalism. In ever-growing circles across the nation and beyond, it’s called yarn bombing, a paradoxical designation that instantly lends itself to head-scratching. Often, it involves wrapping trees and streetlamps in bright knits, without permission.

In this case, though, the matronly vandals had gotten an advance OK from the owner of the bench they were about to attack.

So imagine, as the sun itself needled through iron-gray skies, what passersby thought when they slowly shuffled into the corner bakery for coffee or turned to look from their cars at the stop light.

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