Purl of an idea to beat cancer at Green Festival

Jun 9 2008 by Liz Hands, The Journal

FESTIVAL visitors wrestled with four-metre long knitting needles at the weekend to raise money for a cancer charity.

The Big Knit project was launched at the 14th Newcastle Community Green Festival which attracted more than 10,000 people to a sun-drenched Leazes Park.

The aim is to create the world’s biggest one-piece knitted textile, which will be auctioned when it reaches six metres by four metres.

Textile designer and producer Ingrid Wagner came up with the idea after the death of her mother Margaret, who lived in Sunderland, from breast cancer.

Using needles made from drainpipes, festival visitors were invited to cast stitches in return for a donation to Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

Ingrid, who will soon be moving into the crafts cluster at Kirkharle Courtyard in Northumberland, will take the textile to other outdoor events this year and hopes to raise thousands of pounds.

She said: “I want to do something about a disease which is destroying people and to make a difference right now.

“A lot of people who have taken part in the knitting said they did so because they have lost someone to cancer or knew somebody who had.”

It took eight hours to knit one foot of material across the four-mere length.

Ingrid, who lives in Sunderland, is using wool edges trimmed from newly-woven material in Yorkshire mills, which would otherwise be thrown away.

She also recycles the offcut material in some of the rugs, curtains, wall and sofa coverings which she makes. In March she made it into the Guinness Book of Records for using the biggest pair of needles in the world at 3.5 metres.

As well as running her business Ingrid Wagner Rugs and Art Creation, she also operates Real World Journeys, which takes groups on creative skills tours of Morocco. Ingrid worked in film editing for the BBC before teaching in Poland and Russia.

She then took a textile design degree at Cumbria College of Art in Carlisle and a masters in art and business at Northumbria University.

The Green Festival, which also featured music, story-telling, drum workshops and a fashion show, was one of two festivals in the region yesterday.

In Durham, a 10-hour festival at the racecourse featured 100 live acts.

Bands such as Bloc Party, Pendulum and Zero 7, and DJ Gilles Peterson attracted 4,000 visitors. The festival was organised by Durham University Students’ Union to raise £10,000 for local and international charities.

Sun shines for record breakers

THE sun shone and crowds flocked to a record breaking regatta in a Northumberland town on Saturday.

With more than 400 crews taking part in this year’s Hexham Regatta the event is the biggest single-day rowing regatta in the UK.

Captain of Hexham Rowing Club George Doody said the day had been a big success.

He said: "Hexham Regatta is a huge success story for the North East – we are successfully punching well above our weight.

"Previously, the only three equivalent events in the UK that were larger than Hexham Regatta were all held in the South East of England.

"This year they’ll be hard pressed to top Hexham’s success."

Races were run every two minutes in the sunshine on Tyne Green in the town.

To accommodate all 289 races, most had to start before the crews competing in the previous race had reached the end of the 700m course.

Racing officials had given special permission for this to happen and the race schedule ran from 8.30am to just after 7pm. Crews came from all the major rowing clubs in the North East and from as far afield as Dumfries and Galloway.

Signing up for a taste of army life

MILITARY fanatics got a real taste of life as a pre-First World War soldier at the weekend.

Members of the Great War Society recreated a war encampment at the 1913 Colliery Village of the Beamish Museum to give willing volunteers the chance to get hands-on.

Dressed in authentic uniforms, the soldiers set up camp in a field near the pit cottages, with tents and camp fires, to portray military life of almost a century ago.

Visitors were offered the opportunity to fill out the Attestation form and learn to drill with the men, and earn the King’s shilling.

Meanwhile others chose to learn about day-to-day camp life, from kit polishing to cooking and skirmish exercises. The Last Post signalled the end of the day’s activity.