Gnarly knitters make their point, from guts o' yarn to zombies

These are not your cute-booties-and-scarves knitters. These are your street-art-and-zombie knitters.

They're out there, knitting needles twirling, creating items that would shock and baffle their quiet, kindly, blue-haired granny predecessors.

These knitters have nothing against afghans and sweaters. They just think that knitting them is boring. One big yarn yawn.

Sometimes it's tough being them.

"When you're carrying around half a knit liver, people think you're crazy," Matie Trewe said.

Trewe is well known in this unique knitting community for her digestive system — not the one in her body, the one she knit. It's complete from its cute red tongue through a pink esophagus, yellow pancreas, brown liver, green gallbladder, peach small intestine and red anus.

Trewe created it for a "Blood 'n' Guts, Horror 'n' Gore" knitting swap. ("I took the 'guts' part literally," she said.) It was organized at www.craftster.org, where a lot of what she calls her "kindred spirits" hang out.

Her digestive system was such a hit, "I've made two more since then."

Trewe, 22, likes to say she "lives in a tiny apartment in Eugene, Ore., with one loving fiancé and enough yarn to knit two more." Her Web site is www.strangebuttrewe.com; her first name, she said, is pronounced "Matie like a pirate — arrrrr."

Obviously, these knitters also enjoy a quirky sense of humor.

Like the Knittas crew in Houston. They're an anonymous bunch, with nicknames such as P-Knitty, LoopDogg, Knotorius N.I.T and SonOfaStitch.

"We were inspired by other street art that we'd run across," said thirtysomething AKrylik, one of the founders.

So they turned to their needles to create, as AKrylik said, "knit antenna cozies, wraps for stop and street signs and poles, trees, door handles, coasters and — beer-bottle cozies.

"Those," she said, "are really interesting to try and slip on while no one's looking."

Each piece has a tag with the phrase "Knitta, Please!" and the group's corner of the Internet (www.myspace.com/knittaplease).

"We've heard back from almost 800 folks," she said.

One popular project: dozens of small knitted lighter cozies the crew scattered throughout a bar on New Year's Eve.

"Of course, they had a disclaimer on the back asking the user to remove the lighter before lighting," AKrylik added.

Hannah Simpson also adds a knit presence to the local pub where she works in Oxford, England.

The job "allows me a lot of spare time to knit during the quiet day shifts," she said.

Simpson admitted she leans toward "subversive subjects," such as knitted figures from her favorite horror flick, "Dawn of the Dead."

"I made four zombies and three 'live' characters — because," as she said, "the zombies had to outnumber the living."

The characters were for a Zombie Swap she organized at the Craftster Web site.

"I overran the deadline by about a month, but the recipient said it was worth the wait," Simpson said. "She decorated her Christmas tree with them."

So onward they create, these nimble-fingered, nicely naughty knitters and knittas.

The Knittas are encouraging like-minded folks to "cover your town in one big blankie!" Especially using all those half-finished projects lying around the house. "Now you can just run outside and wrap it around a tree in your neighbor's yard," AKrylik suggested.

Simpson "is busting to finish" her current project, a pair of characters from the "Dawn" sequel "Day of the Dead" — because, she said, "I'm desperate to tackle the next big thing ... 'Star Wars.' "