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4 Corners Festival 2025: Knitting the City Together

I don’t knit, or crochet, and whilst I can sew, it’s fairly crude and isn’t going to be my main leisure time activity any time soon. But lots of people love needlecraft of all sorts, and another of the events that has become a fixture in the 4 Corners Festival has been the knitting event. It usually conflicts with the Wonderful Wander, so I've never been, and even though it was on a different Saturday this year I still I still didn’t make it along. However, lots more people did get along to the event this year, perhaps because it didn’t clash with the Wander, perhaps because it was in a new venue this year -Saint John’s Newtownbreda Presbyterian. We will doubtless discover why when we start digging into the statistics and responses garnered by Megan from the post-event surveys next week (note – these are important for our planning so if you were at an event and haven’t filled one in, please do so, even at this late stage.) 
For the group this year the event not only involved the usual knitting and chatting, but also learning how to make Saint Brigid’s crosses with reeds, given that it was actually happening on Saint Brigid’s day. For those who don’t know, such crosses were woven from freshly pulled (not cut) reeds or rushes on the first day of February in anticipation of the coming spring, to hang over the entrance of a home or an animal byre as a blessing for those coming under its shelter.
But whilst I neither learned to make such a cross or how to knit at Saint John’s, I did do some knitting in another venue.  In 2 Royal Avenue we not only had the photographic exhibition that I wrote about previously, but also Peter and Heidi Gardner set up their  Peace Loom, which is essentially a giant “French Knitting” frame. 
Once again, I  confess, that just as I was wrong in being sceptical about 2 Royal Avenue as a venue, I was also wrong about the impact of this event. I had seen it more as an “interesting installation”, but from the opening evening I could see the amazing way it (under the gentle but skulled tutelage of Peter and Heidi) drew people into conversations, both as one “knitter” told the next one what to do, and among people watching the “knit” develop, row on row, with different colours of donated wool spiralling around the loom. Indeed after I had a go myself and then settled back to be a watcher, I realised that whilst the knitters seemingly went round in endless circles around the loom, gradually, bit by bit, they were weaving a huge spiral net which ultimately, over the course of the next 9 days, stretched out for 92 metres, before then being wound up into a multi-coloured woollen ball which will doubtless make its way around various churches and groups associated with 4 Corners over the next wee while. 
Because that ball, and also the knitters group, encapsulates what 4 Corners is about... repeated interactions between different people from different parts of this city and beyond, in different places and forms, weaving together something, like a Saint Brigid’s cross that will bring blessing to this place that we call home.
Selah

ps You can read Allan Leonard's take on the Peacemakers Loom and see a short video at https://sharedfuture.news/peacemakers-ball-woven-belfast-stories/



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