Ripon Community Knitters Gritter Jumper

Yorkshire Post

The unveiling of one of Econ’s iconic gritter vehicles, ‘Goldie,’ who has been dressed in a massive, custom-knit Christmas jumper and Santa hat, crafted by the talented Ripon Community Poppy Project.

Transcript

00:00I'm Hazel Barker and the Britain Community Poppy Project ladies got

00:05together in 2017 to start knitting for poppies and since then we have gone

00:11bigger and bigger each year and we were tasked to knit a jumper for a gritter

00:16which I thought was an operative, a man, and it turned out to be a great big

00:22enormous wagon called Goldie. So we've knit a jumper for Goldie, it's got a hat

00:28with a great big bobble on it and lots of presents coming out of the gritter

00:33chute at the back. There's about 25 ladies meet on a Monday morning at

00:38Hazel House and we have a Knit and Knatter group with about 35 people in all

00:42who work at home for various reasons and just carry on knitting. I keep checking

00:49them all and they finish whatever we've tasked them to knit and it all comes

00:54together. Never thought in our wildest dreams we'd ever do a gritter. We've done a tank

00:59but this is I think best of them all. I was one of the organisers that started the

01:05Community Poppy Project. I'm chairman at the moment. I do the logistics behind the

01:11scenes so you've got 1,200 balls of wool. The actual jumper itself is 28 foot

01:20long and it's 32 foot wide. That goes right over the top of the the gritter

01:27and then there's 1,200 balls of wool in there so yeah it's pretty big. Man hours

01:37you're looking at 4,500 at a conservative estimate and if you work

01:43that out one person working 40 hours a week that will be two years and

01:48ten weeks. It's a huge project for the Community Poppy Project. It's not our

01:55biggest but it's one of the biggest that we've done. We've just been talking to

01:59some of the children from Grace Jones Primary School and they gave us lots of

02:03ideas and one of them suggested a huge Santa on the Cathedral so we maybe

02:08have to talk to the Cathedral about that and see if we can do something.

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