The World's First Ever Knitted Billboard

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6 x 3 metre knitted billboard6 x 3 metre knitted billboard

Member of Islington WI and knitting project leader, Aneeta Patel, said, ”The ‘knitvertising’ is a real achievement. Measuring 6 x 3 meters it’s certainly the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in creating.”

The unusual billboard, measuring 6m by 3m, was unveiled in Islington today at the launch of a campaign to find a WI member to become a presenter on Sky Learning.

Only the 205,000 members of the WI are eligible for the competition and the winner, dubbed a "W-Icon", will be chosen by a panel of celebrity judges, the board of the National Federation of Women's Institutes, a Sky representative, and a public vote.

The giant knitted billboard - believed to be a world first - is made from 80km of wool, enough to stretch from London to Brighton, and took more than 250 hours to create.

It is now on its way to Liverpool on the back of a truck for the Women's Institute annual general meeting tomorrow.

The campaign, designed by PR agency Cake, is to promote the search for a presenter to become the face of the WI and host a "How To" series of guides to modern life, to be hosted online and broadcast on Sky TV.

Sky said the subjects would range from how to understand social networking, greener gardening, and sexual health for older women, as well as using the more traditional skills WI members are famous for.

Lucy Milton, Sky's head of arts and sponsorship, said: "By combining Sky Learning with the WI's heritage in keeping life-long skills alive in households all over the country, we hope that both the search for the W-Icon and the 'How To' guides will be genuinely useful and inspirational."

Aneeta would like to thank some amazing people without whom this project would have been more impossible than it was!

  • Sarah and Stephanie at Cake
  • WI knitters: Steffy Pawling, Rita Taylor and Anita Murphy
  • Buzz at All The Fun Of The Fair (light green yarn)
  • Stephano at Adriafil (dark green yarn)
  • Uppingham yarns (white and black yarn)
  • Rowan (Big Wool) - even though I'd suggest you never trust them with your bank card details!
  • My flatmate Devina (for bringing me dinners when I had to knit for 12 hours a day)

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