Knit Your Town Project
We're big fans of the Knit Your Town Project, especially because we ran a project called Knitted Leeds which was part of this community initiative! If you feel inspired to get involved in one of these projects, we hope this page will give you a good feeling for what it's all about.
The most important thing to know is that the aim of each project is to create a large (several feet by several feet) wall hanging that's an illustrated map of your local town or city. But each project is more than that because it gets a community of knitters (and perhaps crocheters and the odd stitcher or feltmaker!) to come together on a joint enterprise to create an amazing work of art.
The Knit Your Town Project is run by a lady called Sue Howell who lives in Newbury. You can read a little about how Sue started it further down this page, but probably the best way to get to know what it's all about is to watch a lovely video that was made about the making of Knitted Newbury. Thanks go to Maria of the Knitted Newbury project for making this video and for letting us show it here. Maria's video was a very important help when we began running our Knitted Leeds project a couple of years ago.
So please click on the link below to see the video by Maria.
Virtual Exhibition
There would have been a brilliant exhibition at Wonderwool Wales of all the knitted maps that have been made to date but unfortunately the event had to be cancelled. So Sue has made a Virtual Exhibition slideshow showing all the maps which you can see by clicking this image:
If you'd like to start running a Knit Your Town project or you want to know of any that might be happening in your area, please let Sue Howell know by emailing her using the address that is shown at the end of the virtual exhibition slideshow.
A Brief history
The birth of the Knit Your Town Project happened when Sue moved to a small village in the middle of Wales a few years ago. Not knowing anyone and being keen to make friends and do something for the community, she set up the first project which was a knitted map of the view over the village and the valley from Sue's front window! Sue then moved to Newbury and organised the Knitted Newbury community project. Based on its success, and keen to see other communities get involved in knitting their own town or city, she set up the Knit Your Town Project.
We first came to hear about large knitted maps when Sue contacted us in May 2018 asking if we'd like to have Knitted Newbury on display at the Southern Wool Show event that we run in Newbury. Looking at a photo of it, and seeing how amazing it is, we said "yes please"! Shortly afterwards, we had the idea of creating a similar piece as a community project for the Spring Into Wool show that we run in Leeds. With much help from Sue, and with the help of 40 volunteer knitters in and around Leeds, we created the illustrated map in time for our show in 2019.
