Canadian War Museum Knitting Challenge

The Canadian War Museum partnered with IODE for their November, 2015 “Awesome Sunday” programming.  November 29th's theme was “Awesome Yarn” – a companion program to compliment the World War Women exhibit on now until April, 2016.  

Six IODE Walter Baker members participated in a family friendly day of learning to knit, and learning more about what the groups, like IODE, did during the world wars.  IODE was given the opportunity to set up a  educational display that showed museum goers IODE did much, much more than just knit for the war efforts!

Museum visitors and knitters were asked to bring donations of new, hand-knit items with a goal of filling a horse-drawn WWI transport wagon as an homage to the knitted items produced and donated during the two world wars.  Even the horsequin (horse mannequin) hitched to the wagon was spectacularly adorned with a knitted “onsie”, specially designed by Ottawa professional knitter Amanda Schwabe.  The donation collection ran until January 31st, 2016 with 1,850 (give or take a mitten or two) knitted items collected by the Museum.  The Museum, then in turn donated the collection to IODE Ottawa for distribution to our various services contacts (homeless shelters, women's' shelters, local and northern schools, etc.).