The Glasgow City of Science is attempting to break a world record with a hygiene lesson later this month, but they need some help from knitters in order to do so.
The plan is to involve primary school students across the city and to use knitted microbes such as E. coli, the common cold and swine flu to show how germs are passed from person to person.
With about two weeks left until the planned event, they’re still in need of a lot of wooly germs.
At last check they had just over 700 of the microbes and still needed 980 to meet their goal.
This is probably a shoutout better directed to UK knitters and those in Europe, but if you’ve got a little time and some yarn on your hands in the next few days, why not knit up some microbes to help kids? You’ll be able to say you were part of one of the weirdest knitting-related world records I’ve yet heard of, and that’s saying something.
If you were wondering, the current record for the largest hygiene lesson is held by the Health Protection Agency in England, which included 2,147 students from schools across the UK in a lesson in 2012. The hope is that the Glasgow lesson can include more than 36,000 children at all the primary schools, who will take part in a 40-minute lesson on handwashing and the spread of germs.
Have you ever knit a microbe? I’d love to hear about it!
[Photo via the Glasgow City of Science.]
The link to the pattern no longer work. Is the pattern available somewhere else?
This was written in 2014 so it isn’t live any more. You can find some knit and crocheted microbes here: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/search#query=microbes