The knitting pattern calls for a 29-metre wingspan.

Knitters from all over North America, including the GTA, have contributed pieces big and small to construct a form-fitting tea cosy to cover the 70-year-old DC-3 resting on a plinth outside the Yukon Transportation Museum.

This week, McMaster University grad Jessica Vellenga and her fellow textile artists start putting them all together to create the snug wrap for the legendary flying machine.

“It’s one of those unique things that can happen in the Yukon,” museum executive director Casey McLaughlin told the Star.

McLaughlin, who conceived of the idea and brought it to Vellenga, finds herself working with a Whitehorse construction company for the first time. They’ve volunteered to hoist the finished cosy onto the venerable plane.

A Whitehorse architect, Mary Ellen Read, designed the pattern. Vellenga, an arts educator at the Yukon Arts Gallery, and her co-ordinators of the Yarn Bomb Yukon project, Vanessa Corkal and Bree-An Lucas, have laid the pattern out in donated space at the historic Old Fire Hall, where they and more volunteers will knit it all together.

“We’ve had knitted pieces by kids. We have squares from a lady who’s 90, who lives in B.C.,” said Vellenga, who figures she’s put in 300 hours on the project since March with the most intense stretch yet to come.

The finished project will be wrapped around the DC-3 on Aug. 11 and stay there two weeks. Then the 74 4-by-6 blankets that will make up the cosy will be pulled apart and given to charity and shelters, said Vellenga.

Yarn bombing is the art of covering public things with yarn but the Yukon project may well be the biggest effort yet, said McLaughlin.

It’s given her an opportunity to bring attention to the museum, a repository for the Yukon’s transportation history. And to the DC-3 McLaughlin refers to as “she,” all 8,000 kilograms of which spin around as a weather vane for the Yukon capital.

The Yukon Yarn Bomb is not just a matter of throwing yarn over metal.

Vellenga, who taught knitting workshops around the territory to enlist more volunteers, has worked with art conservators in Whitehorse and Ottawa to keep the DC-3 safe in the process.

Knitters used exclusively acrylic yarn to guard against dye leakage if it rains on the cosy and to minimize the danger of insect infestation in any of the imported pieces, she said.

“There are not too many DC-3s left out there anymore,” said McLaughlin. “We don’t want to harm an artifact. She’s an old tough girl but we want to make sure she’s just as beautiful once we’re done.”

While many of the pieces are a riot of colour and texture from knitters using up leftover skeins, or small squares stitched together into standard size, some of the blankets reflect the DC-3’s history, said McLaughlin.

The flags of India, China and the United States, all countries where the DC-3 worked, are part of the mosaic as is one in U.S. Army green to reflect the plane’s military service.

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Is Vellenga considering something even bigger and more public after this, the Parliament Buildings, perhaps?

“I’m open to offers,” she said with a laugh.

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