Life-sized knitted tank to commemorate D-Day

NationalWorld.com

A community group has knitted a life-sized tank to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.  Around 30 volunteers spent eight hours a day for nine months knitting eight-inch squares for the artwork, which was modelled on a Churchill AVRE tank.  The stunning creation is now a whopping 24ft (7.3cm) wide and 7ft (2.1m) tall and is covered in the olive green squares that the volunteers knitted.

Transcript

00:00 We were invited to do this project, I suppose it was a bit of a challenge really. We'd previously

00:06 done a knitted car cover which was to raise awareness for the classic car gathering that's

00:12 held in Ripon and we were challenged to build a tank and the tank behind me is the Churchill

00:20 Avery bunker busting tank and we originally were going to do it as a model, a scaled down

00:27 model but when we saw the dimensions we thought why not go for the full-size model. There's an

00:33 awful lot of hours gone into planning how we would come up with this structure behind us.

00:39 We had a charity called Jenny Roof Workshops who work with people with learning difficulties.

00:46 We engaged them because they have a laser cutter that does wood. We then needed to source the

00:52 timber and the local building supplies, MKM builders, were very kind to donate over two

00:59 and a half thousand pounds worth of materials for this project and we have a local men's shed

01:05 and we asked them to be involved. They jumped at the opportunity. We had to put some sort of

01:12 netting onto the timber structure so the ladies had something to fasten their knitted squares.

01:20 It looks like one piece of knitting but it's made up of eight inch squares and each eight inch square

01:27 it takes about two and a half to three hours to knit. They're then sewn together, then get sewn

01:34 onto two inch squares of netting so that it stays in place. So we reckon material-wise we've used

01:44 about 2,300 balls of wool. It's probably taken, conservative estimate, 70,000 hours to do

01:55 everything we do in for D-Day which this tank is a huge portion of that. We've been very, very

02:03 kindly allowed to use this, what they call a rub shelter. Two engineers here in Ripon

02:12 and they've very kindly let us use this building. We've also got it booked in on D-Day itself.

02:20 It's going to be on the Cathedral Forecourt where we'll be taking part with the rest of the

02:26 country in a beacon lighting ceremony at 9.15pm and luckily for Ripon we've got a relative of Sir

02:33 Winston Churchill coming to do the beacon lighting. Jack Churchill is coming to actually light the

02:40 beacon and I think Ripon is the place to be on D-Day so please come.

02:49 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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