Madiba blanket at Pretoria's Union Buildings sets new world record for SA
The big blanket not only broke the world record, it smashed it by setting the bar three times higher than the initial world-record holding blanket. The Union Building Madiba blanket measured 3 133 square meters. The previous record was 1 020 square meters.
The knitting of the blankets laid out on the Union Building was part of Carolyn Steyn's initiative to knit 67 blankets for Nelson Mandela Day.
"It started as light-hearted banter between Zelda La Grange [Mandela's long-time assistant] and myself where she challenged me to make 67 blankets for Mandela Day last year," Steyn told News24.
"I don't have 67 friends to help and I can't do it on my own, so I turned to Facebook and created a group at 03:00 one morning in desperation. The next day I woke up to hundreds of members and now we are thousands and thousands."
The initial goal was to collect 21 000 blankets by April 21, but that expectation was well exceeded when thousands of people, along with their woolly contributions, got together at the Union Buildings on Tuesday.
People at the Union Building on Tuesday had to stitch all the donated blankets together.
The 67 Blankets for Nelson Mandela Day posted on their Facebook page saying, "A BIG thank you must go out to Gail Styger and her Wot-If? Trust Team. Without these wonderful people we would never have broken the record by such a huge margin. These are the ladies from Diepsloot who arrived en-mass yesterday and settled down on the cool blankets to stitch them together. Not only did these ladies help on the day but they made around 500 blankets in a very short space of time."
Steyn said it was amazing to see how people got involved, from school children to people in old age homes and prisons.
"The deeper message is that we are binding our nation together with colourful threads and I think it's so powerful," she said.
Sello Hatang, Nelson Mandela Foundation chief executive, said that the blankets would be distributed across all nine provinces to people who are in need.
"We will be reaching out to centers. We will be reaching out to people on the side of the road. We will be going far and wide," he said.
Author:Traveller 24, News24
NewsWire ID: 1718
File photo: Gallo images