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PICKING UP THREADS

This was written in
2007
so is now very dated

There were many special events in 2000 but they didn’t end then. They have carried on in other guises ever since. Some have been at specifically Maths events though most have been at festivals and events encompassing all aspects of Science. The offer of free yarn has also carried on and is still being taken up by a few schools each year, either for an after-school activity or in the Summer term when most of the ‘real work’ of the year is over.

Other seeds were sown at Maine Road. We were visited by two ladies who turned out to be Federation Education Coordinator and Federation Science Coordinator from Cheshire Women’s Institute. They were overawed by what they saw and returned many times during the day. They asked many questions, as they had the germ of an idea of how they could use our ideas with the ladies of the WI. Over the following weeks we had several phone calls and a plan was hatched.

Each county has its own WI group and these are subdivided into smaller groups. One of the big events of the WI year is the annual competition where groups and individuals compete in many different areas, including the cake and jam-making for which they are so well-known. The two coordinators decided that the following year’s competition should have a non-competitive category where each group could display a small afghan. They had funding to encourage members to get involved in science projects and they saw our method of using Maths as being a way of fulfilling that aim. Many of their members could already knit and would probably never associate the skill with anything mathematical.

Cheshire WI happened to have a member who we had met a few times before and who had been to workshops with us and knew exactly how we introduced the project. She volunteered to start the ball rolling and in early January set up workshops for representatives of groups from all over the county. The first of these took place one evening. Another two took place, on the next day, at the WI’s Chester headquarters. As it happened I was not working that day so, on the morning of the event, I set off to Chester to see what was happening. (I had warned them in advance that I might be there, if circumstances allowed) It was an appalling foggy, icy morning but I eventually managed to reach the Park-and-Ride car park and took a bus into the city centre. It took a little while to find the WI, who were housed in a beautiful old historic building.

There was a very large room full of ladies surrounded by balls of wool, examples that had been prepared for them and endless pieces of paper, full of geometric patterns. They were all very involved and had to assimilate the necessary information to take back to their individual groups. At lunch-time the first group of ladies left, another took their place and the process was repeated.

The rules for the ‘non-competitive competition’ were established. Each entry was to be a small afghan, or wall-hanging, no larger than one metre square, based on the idea of using squares divided diagonally into two colours. More than two colours could be used but there could be no more than two in each square. The groups were also told that they could take away their entries, after the event, to add more squares to make a full-size afghan, if they so wished. The afghans were to be displayed, in the summer, at the annual Cheshire Show so they had about four or five months to complete the project.

At that time nobody could have predicted that there would be no Cheshire Show that year but as the summer arrived many such events were cancelled due to the Foot and Mouth epidemic. The competitions had to be reorganised and it was decided that they should take place at Chester Guildhall in September. By one of those strange coincidences that seem to happen to us so often, the date fell at a time when we were on holiday from school. Unlike other parts of the country, at that time, schools here were open for the second half of August and closed for two weeks in September. This traditional holiday pattern was a relic of the cotton-weaving which had been the dominant industry of the area.  

We went to the Guildhall, which was a far better setting for the exhibition than any marquee could ever have been. We were met by the Town Crier and a lot of very excited ladies. It was the first time anyone had seen the full-scale of what had been achieved. There were over 60 afghans on display, in every pattern and colour imaginable. They made a spectacular array. We were very glad there was to be no judging. It would have been a very difficult task. To my mind there was one that stood out from the rest. It was something I would have liked to have created myself. After that there were so many that had their individual merits it would have been impossible to rate one higher than the others. Some showed a great deal of imagination, others stuck very closely to our original suggestions. Each was a triumph for the group that had created it and the ladies vied for our attention to comment on their entries. They were proud of what they had achieved and we were amazed by the outcome of a small input that had been passed on by word of mouth to a large number of ladies, many of whom would have claimed that they did not understand Geometry or any other kind of Maths. For these ladies MathsYear2000 lasted almost until the end of 2001.

Click here to see photos of Cheshire afghans

18f. AFGHANS & MATHGHANS continued