It’s been a busy week for the guerrilla knitters in Kings Cross.

Three days ago, we caught their yarn going up in Fitzroy Gardens, but they’ve been working around the clock with a crane and a giant ladder, and the results are spectacular.

I love the idea of public art, but all too often the stark modernist blocks and balls in our public squares seem more alienating than intriguing. They stand so defiantly, inscrutable.

I Heart Kings Cross is something quite different. Warm, friendly – probably a bit smelly after all the rain – each piece of crochet and cross-stitch is so obviously made by someone.

It’s glorious and wonderful.

A pair of eyes are ogling across at a bikini-clad pole (that’s at the pedestrian crossing where Darlinghurst Road becomes Macleay Street), and, as if to underscore the knitters’ take on public art, they’ve wrapped one of the discs in Dennis Wolanski’s Angled Wheels of Fortune in a relaxed, loose weave – “Chill out, ’80s sculptor.”

The police station has been drafted, too, and the entire spectacle now stretches a little further down Macleay Street and up Darlinghurst Road, though the focus remains on Fitzroy Gardens.

This is one of the most unexpectedly glorious things I’ve seen in ages. Walk by, if you can.

They’ve been knitting for a month or two, now, in cafes and bars and on park benches, but over the weekend the assembled thread wound its way around Kings Cross.

Centred on Fitzroy Gardens, and the beautiful El Alamein fountain, but extending a little way along Macleay Street and Darlinghurst Road, it’s a project called I Heart Kings Cross, and it’s part of the council’s Art & About program.

The guys behind it, Reef Knot, formed out of the ashes of Knot Gallery four years ago, where the crew had collaborated with designers, musicians, sculptors and painters to create installations for street, art and music festivals.

Inspired by the work of Newtown’s Denise Litchfield, Texas’s Knitta Please, and Stockholm’s Maskerade, they’ve tackled this massive knitting project.

Collectives are springing up all over the place to knit in public places. It’s being called guerrilla knitting, and I reckon its roots are in guerrilla gardening. It’s a little bit political, and a lot about creating sections of spontaneous beauty in sometimes tired neighbourhoods.

We don’t usually post so many pictures, but this is really just spectacular, and every single bit of knitting is worth seeing. We started to feel a little sorry for the trees without woollen cloaks, especially with the current cold snap.