There were no cans of spray paint or protest signs. Instead, this graffiti revolution started with knitting needles and bags of yarn.

The "yarn bombing" evolved over cups of tea and coffee shared at local cafes, said Laura Korch, who came up with the idea last summer after joining the Carrboro Arts Committee.

"It seems like everyone's always outside in Carrboro, walking around and riding their bikes, so I wanted to try to get together a project that would be outdoors, and a yarn bombing just seemed like a cheap, affordable way to spread a lot of color," she said.

The act is as much about knitting together a community as it is about art, the yarn bombers said.

Knit graffiti, aka yarn bombing, was ignited decades ago by people who wanted to give urban environments a softer, more artistic edge. In 2009 two women from Vancouver, Canada, published "Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti."

The first International Yarn Bombing Day was held June 11, and the spontaneous art usually results in people stopping, staring and smiling.

Resident Lynda Baker said she leapt from the car her husband was driving Saturday morning to photograph a yarn-bombed bench across from the Century Center.

"It's so exciting," Baker said. "It's instant art, and it's going to give people pleasure."

Although some cities consider yarn bombing vandalism and remove the pieces, the Carrboro group got permission from the Board of Aldermen and agreed to hang pieces on specific public spaces.

Korch said about 95 percent of the yarn was donated; they used $50 of a $100 Arts Committee grant to buy the rest at the Scrap Exchange in Durham.While smaller pieces took about 30 minutes to stitch together, larger ones took an hour or longer.

The installation will stay up for four weeks and might grow, especially if other people add their knitting.

"It would be great if it just inspired some more people in town," Lauren Lickwar said. "It brings something that sometimes people don't consider to be a work of art."

Like many in the group, 25-year-old Lickwar learned about knitting by watching her mother and grandmother. She herself took up the hobby last summer and installed four pieces made of colorful, linked flowers on a Town Hall bicycle rack. It was a fun way to remember the creativity of previous generations, she said.

Korch said she learned a lot over the last seven months, like how to use the knitting machine that Mary Stowe, owner of Yarns Etc. on Elliott Road, donated to speed up the work on bigger pieces.

She had no idea how long the project would take or how hard it would be to motivate people, she said.

Kristyn Seeley, 33, and Paige Corriher, 27, crafted multicolored, striped sleeves for the sidewalk railings at the Century Center.

Each was more than 7 feet long with more than 600 knitted rows; it took 40 to 60 hours to make all three sleeves, Seeley said.

The knitting novice now can finish about 10 rows while sitting in traffic jams on Interstate 40 and even knit in the dark. It's a fun way to pass the time at home with her 10-month-old son, she said.

"It was a relief to have found this. It's such a creative outlet," she said.