Close-knit tag team

They weave graffiti with texture

Members of the South End Knitters are behind the sleeve of colorful graffiti covering a lamppost outside the Flour Bakery + Cafe on Washington Street, where they meet weekly to knit, eat, and talk. Chris Kramek (above right) checks his progress on a scarf during a recent gathering. (Photos by John Bohn/Globe Staff)

F ew people in Boston dare face the winter without knitted protection like scarves and sweaters. Seniors, college students, parents, children - even the dogs are often bundled in yarn. And joining the fad of late is a longstanding member of the South End community: the lamppost in front of Flour Bakery + Cafe on Washington Street.

Snugly fitting the post and measuring about 3 feet long, the hand-knit sleeve features more than a dozen different colors of yarn woven into geometric shapes and complicated patterns, including a glow-in-the-dark skull and crossbones and a lime-green spider. At the bottom, swallows hold banners that read "South" and "End."

Although it evokes a sweater, the covering is actually a form of public art, according to members of the South End Knitters, a club that meets weekly at the bakery and constructed the project.

"We wanted something to bond us to the area and bond the area to the art," group member Beth Levine, 50, said as she sat in Flour on a recent weeknight, knitting a pair of green socks. She had joined club members at a large table in the center of the bakery - the same table the group has commandeered almost every Thursday evening since its inception in July.

"There used to be a lot more public art" in the neighborhood, continued Levine, who has lived in the South End for nearly 20 years and works in analytics for Sovereign Bank. "Knitting is public art, or at least it should be."

Levine said it took seven members of the group about two months to finish what they call a "fiber art project," which began as a large continuous rectangle that each person took home to work on for a week before passing it on at the next meeting.

The project drew inspiration from Knitta Please, a self-described "tag crew of knitters" (from the website of the same name), originally based in Houston, who knit coverings onto everything from public monuments to windshield wipers and consider their work a form of graffiti. Founded in 2005 by Magda Sayeg, the two-person project soon ballooned into a 12-person squad, venturing to places as far away as the Great Wall of China, where Sayeg's brother tagged a brick. They made stops in Paris, New York, Montreal, Stockholm, and elsewhere - but never hit Boston.

While Sayeg, 35, receives photos from people who have mimicked her work, she said she wasn't aware of anybody tagging in Boston before the South End Knitters decorated the lamppost. She said she appreciated the nod to her group - which was included in a laminated tag attached to the South End Knitters' fiber art project - and was happy to inspire other people to create art.

"I just trust that people will work with their own environment and their own goals with their individual taste," she said. "I just feel like it makes more sense, where they're inspired by what they do but they put their own signature on it, which is what you do in the graffiti world."

For the South End Knitters, the "signature" is celebrating the artsy South End. There were "no rules, just do," leading to the eclectic piece that the group attached to the lamppost with zip-ties on Halloween night (while forgoing a permit from the city).

The local group applies the "no rules" philosophy to its membership - with the same diverse outcome. While the group's page on popular website www.ravelry.com - they call it Facebook for knitters - shows 15 people in the South End Knitters, members say about nine people, including two men, regularly attend meetings. Their levels of knitting experience range from three months to 30 years, and occupations include MIT book-buyer, tattoo artist, and neighborhood lawyer. Most members are in their early 40s (the oldest is 54), although a recent college graduate joined their ranks in November. Only two members were acquaintances before joining the club.

If the combination is unlikely, it's nonetheless lively. At Flour recently, members made wisecracks about bizarre patterns they saw on Ravelry (such as a thong knit out of licorice) or past projects they had completed (one member knitted a tail for her husband). And while they started with plans to tag only the lamppost, members said they would like to tag something else - and have already started a discussion thread called "Where should we put the next tag?" on their Ravelry page.

For now, though, the sleeve on the lamppost is among the group's proudest achievements, according to member Betsy Holbrook, 32. She moved to South Boston from Greenville, N.C., in September and joined the South End Knitters because she wanted to join a club in her neighborhood. Although the newcomer soon found that Southie is not quite the South End (only three of the club's regular members hail from its namesake), the eight-year knitter jumped into the project's production, knitting a pink and white section. It was her first time intertwining multiple colors, she said .

"We all worked very hard on it," she said. "It was really the best of everybody's knitting."

Maggie Cassidy can be reached at mcassidy@globe.com.