Ponteland knits poppies for Remembrance Day

National World - LocalTV

In order to commemorate Remembrance Day, and in support of their Memorial Hall, volunteers from all around Ponteland have knitted poppies for a giant sail display to be part of their parade.

Transcript

00:00It is a composite of 1,653 knitted poppies, which we've put together and put onto our wonderful,

00:10wonderful framework there. Shoot and see, it's doing very, very nicely. We've been praying for

00:18good weather. We didn't have fantastic weather, but to put it up and I think for Sunday,

00:24the sunshine will be here.

00:26When Steve had the idea, he mentioned to John Loudon, our other trustee, and John Loudon

00:32almost instantly had a sale made for the event. And then they realised that they didn't know

00:39anything about knitting or crocheting and they needed somebody who had an idea of

00:44how to actually make the poppies. So that's where I got involved.

00:48We got a few of the lady trustees involved and sort of said to them, you know, social media,

00:54see if we can get some people in. We had Liz and Jean and Amanda and Trish and Marion and Sheena

01:00and Glenys and Christine and Stephen and Susan and Beryl and Ray and Margaret and Leslie Hughes.

01:07And I've got to go back to Philippa Varley, because I did mention to somebody that she

01:11was 16. She's not our youngest ever knitter, was 12 year old Philippa.

01:17Steve asked for the, to get some people together from the community. So a post went out from the

01:23hall on social media asking for volunteers. And I think we got about 15, 16 people who volunteered

01:31and we invited them along to the hall where they were given a pattern, some wool, and shown

01:37what the idea was. I couldn't believe the response. It was fabulous. It really was good.

01:43And we had a nice little communal meeting in the Memorial Hall and said, you know, can we do this?

01:49Is it going to happen? How long will it take? The number of people who can knit and knit fast

01:54is quite phenomenal. It's just a good reminder to the whole community that people

02:04forfeited their lives for us. Yes. And I think it's just the Memorial Hall itself. We have a

02:12lovely service on Sunday, on the Remembrance Sunday, and we have a lot of people from the

02:20forces, like the air cadets, the scouts, the brownies, all of the parade around from the

02:26leisure centre round to here. When we're taking photographs, it's nice just to have something in

02:32the background. Everybody knows that we're here, it's the Memorial Hall, but what they don't know

02:36is that we've changed all the trustees. In the last couple of years, we've had a whole team of new

02:41trustees who want to make things happen for the next 100 years. We've had 100 of this hall,

02:48and we want to make it stay, stick around. Since the sale's gone up, there's a lot of people who've

02:54actually said that they would have knitted as well and they would be involved for next time. Yeah.

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