with a little help from your friends

Help. We all need it. The Beatles knew it and I’m sure you know it too. You probably also know all about The Big Knit by now, but in case you don’t, we’ve got a fancy website to get you up to speed.

Here at Fruit Towers, we think that helping is pretty important in The Big Knit. We’re asking lots of knitters to help us knit little hats for our smoothie bottles, and we’re making little packs to help friends get together for knitting parties.

Knitting Bee Deborah is one of the knitters who has planned to help us reach our target this year and she’s asked her friends to help her. Deborah has set up a pledge to encourage others to help her knit some hats this year. She’s agreed  to get her needles out and make at least 5 dinky hats this year, but only if 35 others also agree to knit at least 1 hat each.

So if you’re thinking of knitting some little hats for us this year, and need a little help from your friends, create your own pledge, make a Scout’s honour to keep to it, and post the details in the comments section below.
 

hats in a box

If you cast your minds back to blue skies and ferrets, some of you might have seen our village fete ‘guess the number of hats’ competition. Lots of you put your mental arithmetic skills to the test as you attempted to decipher the magic number of hats. After some careful counting, we were pretty impressed to discover that Harriet J selected a number just one tiny hat short of the actual total (632 if you’re interested). We think she has supernatural mathematical powers. And to reward this guessing prowess, we’ll be popping some smoothies in the post to share with her friends.

* sharing optional.

lovely ladies in lace

We think these lovely ladies are more than worthy of this week’s hat(s) of the week title and were created by knitting team Sue and Dorothy. We hope that you’ll agree that these snazzy ladies are quite capable of bringing a summer’s smile to this wet and windy August morning (as we sit here and dream of warmth and summer frocks). Who wouldn’t be envious of Bernadetta’s frills?

They each have their own individual hair styles and we’ll be displaying them in our special Big Knit show case here at Fruit Towers for everyone to admire Aunt Edith’s bows and Sally’s French plait. Pop over if you’re in the area and need some hair-style inspiration.

And whilst you’re hiding inside from the downpours, grab those knitting needles. As always, we’ll be searching through all of the little hats that arrive to Fruit Towers, and it might even be your woolly creation making us all smile next week.

paying homage to the postman

This year’s first hat of the week was knitted by enthusiast Kim Lathe. Kim has knitted us lots of fantastic character hats over the years and when this package of goodies arrived we weren’t disappointed. We think that this creative masterpiece is simply amazing for three main reasons:

1. We love the attention to detail with his knitted glasses.
2. It’s Postman Pat (or as my brother used to call him dee dee dat) – and who doesn’t love him?
3. We think it’s probably right to pay homage to the postman. After all we’re hoping they’ll help to deliver lots of little hats to us this year.

If you fancy seeing your own work in the Fruit Towers showcase then get knitting. We’ll be searching through all the hats that arrive each week to find our winners.

P.S. Lots of brownie points for anyone that can knit a Mrs Goggins or Jess to keep Pat company here in fruit towers.

a short film about little hats

If you're new to our Big Knit project this little film we made last year should give you a better idea of what we are up to...

If you'd like to see it a bit bigger just click here.

hats reunited

One visitor to the fete today was delighted to find a knitted hat she sent into us a few weeks ago that had been selected for our Big Knit display cases in the come and say hello area. We got a polaroid of the two together before they parted ways again.

Update: Here's a beter photo we found in our flcikr group...

a flying visit

These three lovely ladies dropped by Fruit Towers the other day to hand deliver a load of hand knitted hats. Here are just a few of our favourites...

hats of the week 2006

These were the last winners of Hat of the Week in 2006. They were all credited to the intertwining talents of Sarah McLanaghan from Canterbury. If you'd like to see the full archive of 2006's Hat of the Week awards, please click here.