Submitted by: C. Yeung

Thank you to all of our mag-knit-ficent community partners, volunteers and knitters, including the Waves Knitting Circle, St. Anne’s Knitting Group, Richmond Spinners and Weavers’ Guild, Village Knitters, and Wool and Wicker, who joined us in A 1940’s Knit-in: knit a scarf and spin a yarn event on Saturday July 23rd. Not only did visitors learn to create wonderful scarves, mittens, and see how wool and silk yarn was made through spinning demonstrations, but the greatest highlight had to be the sharing and weaving of each other’s stories together through this ’40’s inspired networking (or more accurately, “knit-working”) event.

During World War II, women and children on the homefront got together to knit troops’ necessities such as service scarves and amputation covers. While A 1940’s Knit-in and our current feature exhibit, Women on the Homefront, honour these contributions to the warfront, some knitters also shared with me their continued passion to knit for a cause even today. One knitter of the Waves Knitting Circle spoke of their yearly donations of purple baby caps to the BC Children’s Hospital to spread awareness of shaken baby syndrome. Knitting also continues to make its way to warfronts around the world as the group reminisced of how they once knit 650 helmet liners for soldiers in Afghanistan.

The knitting effort on the homefront continues! We invite all our Knitters to donate handmade scarves for veterans to the Cannery by Remembrance Day, November 11, 2016.

Our next program of the We CAN Do It! Life Hacks in 1940’s series will be the 1940’s Life Hacks for Wartime Communications on August 20th. Stay tuned to learn how to send Morse code messages using the techniques and technology from World War II, listen to a radio drama, and more!

Posted by m.horita

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