BCP Council, England Our BCP Libraries, 4 Nov 2020

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From YouTube: Poppy Craft with Katy

Description

In this video Katy shows you how to make a poppy brooch with some red wool. You can support the Poppy Appeal by visiting the British Legion website: https://www.britishlegion.org.uk/get-involved/poppy-appeal

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Hello, everyone and welcome back to another bcp library, video. Today, I'm going to be showing you how you can make these poppies from some red wall a black button, some felt and a safety pin, and this year there aren't so many volunteers for the poppy appeal, as can be expected due to covert 19. So I thought, it'd be a good idea to show you how you can make one yourself, but the poppy appeal still does need. Donations of british legion do still need your donations to support all the good work that they do.

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So I will leave a link in the description down below, so you can go and support the poppy appeal if you've been wanting to do that. But you haven't been able to find yourself a puppy to buy in a shop, and these poppies will last you for a few years and they also attach to your clothing and you can wear them, maybe on a hat or on a jumper or on a coat when you go out for your walk. So now, I'm going to show you how you can make them.

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So the main part of the poppy requires us to do some french knitting and I've made my own loom by using a toilet rod. Tube and four lollipop sticks stuck around equally spaced and I just used some hot glue and I also have a little hair band around the bottom, which will secure the wall in place.

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So you need to take some red wool, put it through your toilet, roll tube and then take the tail bit and give it a good sizeable amount and thread it through the hair tie or the elastic band and to tie on the wall. I'm just going to show you what I'm doing it's very difficult to explain so just watch what I'm doing like that and then I'm going to do it again for you.

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And feel free to pause the video and rewind it. So you can see exactly what I'm doing, because it's much easier for you to see it than me.

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Try to explain it so once you have your wall tied on, you need to take the wall and put it over the top of the existing loop like this above it and then take the underneath loop and pull it over the top and continuing to do so and, as you do so, just make sure you pull the wall tight at the bottom, pull the tail tight through the band and pull the wall tight as you go around, so we're just putting the piece of wool over the next lollipop stick and bringing the underneath stitch over the top like this, and once you get into the rhythm of this, it's very very easy.

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The hardest part is really just tying it on and just making sure that you keep pulling it tight, and this is something you can do, whilst maybe watching some television or listening to an audio book. It's quite nice to just sit down, and it's quite relaxing to just do this. So again, I'm just pulling it tight, making sure that my stitches are nice and tight and then it will just go through the middle. Your knitting will just grow gradually through the middle of the tube, and then it will come out the other end.

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So at the moment it just looks a little bit like a spider's web, but that's okay, that's how it's supposed to look and you just need to keep going, keep going round and round, and the beauty of using colored lollipop sticks is that you can easily see which one you started on, but it doesn't matter if you don't, you can just mark one of them, and this is how it will eventually look once you've kept going for a while, and I'm just going to do one more layer, we'll run one more row as we call it in knitting and just go round once more on each of the colors.

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So when it comes to tying off your french knitting, you need to snip the wall like this. When you've got the length you want- and you just want it to come out a little bit at the end, you don't need it to be super long.

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It's up to you how big you want to make your poppy and you just need to take the tail of thread and thread it through each of the loops like I'm doing here, and this can be a little bit tricky, especially as you don't want to let the other stitches fall off, but you just need to pull it push it underneath and then bring it through and then take it off, and you just have to do this for each one.

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So, just two more to do now,.

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Making sure that other stitches don't fall off and just pull the thread through and then slip it off of the lollipop stick or your knitting loom. Whichever you have.

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And now, for the last one just pulling it through.

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Pulling it through like this, I think mine just got a little bit caught there, but that's okay, just pulling it through like this and then pulling it out and then pulling it tight to make sure it's tied off and there we have our base for our poppy, and we can then circle it round or spiral it around to make the poppy shape and to do this, you just need a needle and thread I'm using some red thread.

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Just so it doesn't show up, and you just need to start spiraling it round and push your thread in with your needle and then back the same way. And then you can tie these two ends together, because you're not going to be able to tie a knot at the end of your thread, because the stitches for this knitting are quite big. So you just need to tie a knot like I'm doing here and then cut off the excess bit of thread, and then that will secure it in place nicely.

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There we go just need to snip off the last bit of thread, some scissors making sure we don't cut the wall, and you also need to leave the tails of the wall before you start doing this, because we're going to tie them together later so these can get in the way a little bit, but you just have to just keep an eye out that you don't get tangled.

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So I'm just spiraling around my wall and there we go. That's what I was talking about about it getting tangled. You just have to keep be on your toes a little bit and just watch out for it, and you just need to keep spiraling it round, like I'm doing here, just going backwards and forwards with your thread.

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You don't have to be too secure or too neat for this, because you will not see this thread at all, especially if it's red and once we get to the end, just get right to the end with your needle and thread, and then you just need to tie it off and once you have tied it off, you can then take the two pieces of wool and tie them off like I'm doing here. Just tie two knots and this will help shape your poppy as well.

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This will help give it that bit of a unique poppy shape rather than a circle, so you just need to tie two knots like I'm doing here and then once you've tied the knots you can then cut off the excess wool.

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So there we go, and this will be the back of my poppy and this will be the front, so we just need to cut the wall now with some scissors like that and there we have our basic poppy shape.

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So once we have got our basic poppy shapes I've made quite a few. You can make as many as you like. You can just make one. It's totally up to you. We need to find some black buttons and I have a variety of different sizes and I am just seeing which ones go with my shapes better than the bigger one for the bigger one and the smaller one, and then I'm going to use some hot glue to attach my button to the poppy.

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But if you only have some super glue or some different type of glue, then that's absolutely fine or you can sew them. It's totally up to you. You can sew your buttons on, but I just prefer to to glue sometimes because my sewing isn't the best. But if you want to sew yours on, that's totally fine and you just have to make sure you remove all the little bits of stringy bits that hot glue can sometimes give you and I'm just putting the smaller button on now.

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There we go and just be careful that you don't burn yourself with the hot glue, but the advantage of hot glue is it does dry very quickly.

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So now I've just cut out two little leaf shapes from some felt and they are like poppy leaf shapes to mimic. The poppy leaves that you get on the poppies that we buy normally and what I've done is I've taken a safety pin as well quite a big safety pin and make sure the fastening is facing up and just kind of thread it through halfway thread.

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The leaf through the safety pin halfway, got some hot glue again and put some hot glue on the back of the bottom part of the leaf and turn the poppy round.

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Stick it to the middle of the back of the poppy like that, make sure you don't stick the safety pin to it and then put some glue on the top of the back of the poppy and then secure the leaf down, and this will hold the safety pin in place and also act as the leaf on the poppy too, and it's just a neat way of adding a safety pin.

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So these are my finished poppies and you can attach them easily to your clothing by opening the safety pin and the safety pin won't fall out because we've secured it with some hot glue. You can make as many of these as you like. I made quite a few of them because I quite enjoyed doing the knitting part of it, but it's totally up to you how many you make you might just want to make one and don't forget that you can still support the british legion.

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Even though there are not so many volunteers this year, you can go to the link in the description down below to show your support for the poppy appeal.

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But that's all for this video and I will see you in the next.

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