It’s one thing to show your support for a presidential candidate with a T-shirt or a hat. It’s another to stitch a 16-by-46-foot billboard made entirely of yarn. But Polish-American artist Olek did just that, enlisting 38 volunteers (all but two of them women) to craft a giant, pink #ImWithHer banner that now hangs a few hundred yard before the entrance to the Holland Tunnel in New Jersey. Olek posted a video of the surprisingly majestic unveiling on Twitter.
According to The New Yorker, the knit billboard contains a total of 794,880 stitches. Olek first came up with the idea in January because, as she explains, “A lot of artists had at one point been doing pro-Bernie art, and a lot since were doing anti-Trump art, but there simply had not been much pro-Hillary art.” But she initially decided it would be too political and put off the project until a month ago, when she realized, “I couldn’t turn my back. There was too much at stake.” Olek then had four weeks to pull the whole thing together, which culminated in an all-nighter before the unveiling.
Olek—who previously covered the Wall Street bull in yarn back in 2010—explains that working on the project actually made her more pro-Hillary than she initially was. “When it says ‘I’m with her,’ it means Olek is with her,” she told the New Yorker. “It means artists are with her. It means the crochet community is with her. I mean, maybe that’s small, but it still means something.”