Coffee and Yarn Balls

What is this? A weird junk sculpture of a dog? A badly designed ad for Twitter? The bottom of someone's knitting basket? None of the above, it's a holiday season store display from Starbucks. My favorite coffee universe used to deck their stores with lavish and often beautiful displays on a yearly theme. One year (2008) their theme was balls of yarn and knitted patterns, and they populated their coffee interiors with conglomerations like this. You also see a cut-out of a bird shape which is actually made from recycled Starbucks coffee boxes. All of these were in a red and green color scheme; the large yarn ball is a dark green and its neighbor is red. I could only wonder, as I sipped the brew, how many of these had been made (all in China, of course) to go into the many thousands of Starbuckses around the globe. And they would all be thrown out after the winter holiday season! What a shame! As soon as the season was over I went to my favorite Starbucks and asked to take some of the displays home. After some hesitation, they let me have this one, which is now part of my own seasonal set-up. I may have the only one left! You never know though. In later years Starbucks realized they were spending too much on seasonal displays and made them less lavish, and perhaps less collectible.

Sepia brown tech pen ink on sketchbook page, 4" x 3 1/2", January 13, 2018.