Woven into this remarkable works of fabric sculpture are incredible details, from metallic sheen and scratches on a recreated pay phone to grime and fish skeletons on dirty dishes (complete with fabric “water” pouring into the sink).

Working out of Beijing, China, Mongolian artist Gao Rong sews scenes from her own history, drawing on time spent in past apartments, family homes and familiar streets. At the same time, the objects she chooses are easy for anyone to relate to.

Her “meticulously crafted and embroidered pay phone,” for instance, “replicates the chips and scratches of a once-shiny public” utility, preserving the memory of a modern relic. Structurally, the work employs wood, metal, sponge and foam as shaping materials, all covered in detail-driven cloth.

In her own way, Rong is preserving a family tradition, adapting a legacy practice to create a new kind of art. In her more elaborate settings, it can be hard to tell that embroidery is the visible expression, but once realized, that lends a kind of ambiguous softness to nostalgic scenes.

More about the artist: “Gao Rong takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. In banal moments of the everyday – waiting at a bus stop, making a call from a public phone, collecting the mail, catching a cab – she sees a deeper significance. She re-creates quotidian things from her student days and from her life today as an artist in Beijing, documenting her existence in a dramatically fast-changing city. With her hyper-real embroidered sculptures she is recording the memories of a 1980s generation and their experiences of a transforming post-Mao China.”

Her projects intentionally question tradition: “Think of Chinese embroidery and you tend to imagine dragons, phoenixes, and blossoms applied with tiny, delicate stitches – a feminine craft from the imperial past. Gao Rong subverts this notion of decorative ‘women’s work,’ creating large-scale 3D works in stitched fabric wrapped around an armature of sponge, steel frames and wire.”

“Exact representations of peeling paint, moldy shower rooms, electrical fuse boxes, public telephones and bus timetables replace the traditional motifs. Embroidery has become her visual language … it appears astonishingly real. On closer inspection you see that every single detail is embroidered fabric … evocative and nostalgic.”

Spanning interiors, wrapping trees and adorning facades, these big bright red doilies are somehow both conventional and ominous, somewhere between knit holiday sweaters and huge spider webs.

Created by Ashley V Blalock, this Keeping Up Appearances series was started over a half-decade ago and has made its way into various public spaces and museum galleries. They can really tie a room together, so to speak

The series is all about context and intentionally both “anachronistic and antagonistic,” explains the artist. “Although non-threatening in a domestic setting, in the gallery and at this scale, the forms overtake the viewer and loom menacingly. The doilies represent a certain desire to keep up the appearance of gentility expressed through the arrangement of objects in the domestic setting.”

She prefers “crochet, where every stitch is evidence of work by hand. Through her work, she explores themes of discomfort and the coping mechanisms used to provide solace from the stress and trauma of modern life.”

“Inherent is a compulsion to arrange and place and decorate in order to control or influence a perceived outward appearance. The red color gives away the futility of such an act and hints at the unease that exists behind every well-decorated home and lurks below the surface of an obsessive need to control and arrange.”

Delicate patterns of lace adorn the facades of buildings, magnified many times larger than life, echoing the particular motifs of the region’s traditions. The Polish street artist known as NeSpoon travels from one nation to the next, alternately spray-painting or weaving these patterns on public surfaces for events like Sweden’s NO LIMIT festival and Berlin’s Urban Nation. She defines the works as “somewhere in between street art, pottery, painting, sculpture and jewelry.”

Though she’s been working in this style since 2009, NeSpoon began tailoring her lacework designs more specifically to regional traditions over the last few years. In 2017, for example, she met with and observed lacemakers in Póvoa da Atalia, Portugal to commemorate the vanishing craft practiced by female circles of craftspeople. She enlarged their patterns, and incorporated the women themselves into the resulting mural.

While many of these works are officially approved, particularly the larger pieces, NeSpoon also makes use of guerrilla-style methods, quickly spray-painting her lacework onto urban objects like utility boxes.

“Why laces? Because in laces there is an aesthetic code, which is deeply embedded in every culture,” she says. “In every lace we find symmetry, some kind of order and harmony, isn’t that what we all seek for instinctively?”

“Why street art? Because it gives freedom.”

Ground Operation is a conceptually simple earthwork: an incision made in a grassy landscape is pealed back then stitched back together, much like an open wound after an injury or surgery.

French artist Estelle Chrétien sliced open the ground then wrapped electrical cables through it like shoelaces, either in the process of being tied or becoming undone (a mystery left for the observer to unravel, as it were). Her use of cabling is also very intentional, meant to raise questions about what we put into the Earth and how we use it — a surfacing of the secret infrastructure that lurks below.

Similar techniques, themes and materials can be found in other works by the same artist, who has wrapped hay bales in crocheted covers and put boots on trees.

“While in Portugal, I learned how to crochet, and I had this piece of blue agricultural baler twine in a box and the idea of [making a hay bale wrap] came to me,” she says. “When I went back to France, I made it and put it in a field just before farmers stored their bales. I liked working in the middle of a barley field, but most of the work was made at home, so I decided to work outside with my hands more often after that.”

Imagine your grandmother presenting  you with a knitted facehugger, dwarven helm or a life-sized boyfriend pillow for your birthday instead of a scratchy wool scarf. The world of knits goes far beyond beginner’s patterns for sweaters and caps, occasionally encompassing entire rooms or covering military tanks. This collection of weird knitted and crocheted things might even inspire you to break out a pair of needles yourself.

Facehugger Mask

Well, isn’t that cute. It’s a cozy little alien face hugger, just like you always wanted.

Brutal Knitting by Tracy Widdess

‘Brutal Knitting’ is a fitting name for this ongoing project by artist Tracy Widdess, which stretches the craft far beyond its humble origins of warmth and practicality. Her highly unusual knit works include some of the most bizarre hats you’ve ever seen, and a replica of the Lament Configuration puzzle box from Hellraiser.

The World’s Cutest Penguin Sweaters

Australia’s oldest man, 109-year-old Alfred Date, put his 80 years of knitting experience to work to create the world’s cutest sweaters for a bunch of oil-covered penguins after a spill on the Australian Phillip Island. The sweaters keep the penguins from ingesting toxins and prevent water from getting trapped under their oily feathers, which can cause them to freeze.

Gimli’s Dwarven Helm

“The helm I based directly on the helm that Gimli wears in the Lord of the Rings movies, the beard was my own design with massive creative input from my brother,” says DeviantArt member SadDaysCrochet of this creation.

My Knitted Boyfriend

If it’s a little lonely in your bed, but you don’t have the patience that a real flesh-and-blood boyfriend requires, there’s a solution. ‘My Knitted Boyfriend’ can be worn like a terrifying bodysuit by a real person, or stuffed to create a life-sized man-shaped pillow.

Surreal Knitted Room by Olek

The fiber artist known as ‘Olek,’ who’s responsible for yarn bombing practically every surface you can think of, knitted an entire gallery space for a piece called ‘Keith Meets Arch of Hysteria,’ a tribute to artists Keith Haring, Annie Leibovitz and Louise Bourgeois.

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Knit Wit 17 Fantastically Weird Fiber Art Creations