Visit to Watford Grammar Girls School

Our CEO Souvenir went to the Watford Grammar Girls School in Watford

to visit our second Patron Dame Helen Hyde. She enjoyed speding time with Watford Knitting Club of Parents and Teachers.

Watford Grammar Girls School runs a knitting club called "Knit and Knatter" as a lunchtime club where girls can sit and chat while they knit. They have donated 60 wollen bllankets to orphanage in Malawi and they will donate 150 + all blankets they will knit in the future for Rwanda Sisterhood.

Here's a story from Dame Helen Hyde.

How Knit and Knatter began

I am the Headmistress of Watford Grammar School for Girls. We have over 1300 students, aged from 11 to 18 years old. It is a large and busy school, over 300 years old, where the girls are encouraged to think of others and where service is part of our ethos.

Every morning, we have an assembly which is taken by some of the girls, or by me, or by a guest speaker. One morning last year, I was expecting a guest to arrive to speak to the 500 girls who were gathering for assembly in the Main Hall. Just before the assembly was due to begin, I was informed that my guest speaker had not arrived.

I had to think of an assembly topic very quickly. As reading is so important in my school, I decided to speak about a novel I had recently read, The Friday Night Knitting Club. The knitting club in the story helped those who attended as well as encouraging everyone to knit.

I told the girls that I had recently gone back to knitting and crocheting, and as I spoke it occurred to me that this would be a very worthwhile and useful activity for the girls. So I suggested that we start a new lunchtime club called Knit and

Knatter. The plan was that teachers and pupils who could knit would sit and chat while knitting, and we would teach those who couldn’t, how to knit. The members of Knit and Knatter would make blankets for babies by knitting 8-inch squares and then sewing them together into blankets.

This plan has become a huge community effort. The wool is donated by parents, staff and friends of the school; often when I come into my office, there is a pack of wool or a pile of completed multi-coloured squares waiting for me.

Some members of Knit and Knatter make squares; others make whole blankets by themselves; others still add labels or borders. One member of staff who can’t knit

happily sews all the squares together.

Last year, we sent our first 60 blankets to an orphanage in Malawi.

I am so very pleased that we will now work with Sisterhood and that our next 150 blankets, and all future blankets, will go with Sisterhood to mothers in Rwanda.

Dame Helen Hyde DBE

Headmistress.