I have a Shouts&Murmurs piece in this week’s New Yorker, which deals with the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision, and its impact on the crafting community.
In honor of Hobby Lobby, today I’d like to share some images of one of my favorite crafting subsets: bowling pin transformations. When I was a Cub Scout, I was assigned to paint a bowling pin to look like a uniformed Cub Scout, with a yellow crepe paper neckerchief (sadly, no image of my handiwork exists.) While I loved my bowling pin, even as a child I found the idea disturbing, because aren’t bowling pins designed to be knocked down?
As you can see, savvy crafters have created bowling pin cats, bumblebees and poodles. Bowling pins wearing little hats and scarves is a popular motif, which makes me wonder: do bowling pins get chilly?
And don’t the ghost bowling pins remind you of Edvard Munch’s The Scream? If Munch had worked with bowling pins?
