A YORK student who helped knit the largest knitted bobble hat ever to be made in the UK has been inked by Ed Sheeran’s tattooist to commemorate the event.
Amy Mann, who is a nursing student at the University of York and lives in Tang Hall has had an innocent smoothie outline etched onto her calf along with a ball of yarn, some knitting needles and the date of the innocent Big Knit event in Nottingham.
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She said: “Every single tattoo I have has a special story behind it.
“That’s why I wanted to do something special, to celebrate a special day.”
The 30-year-old joined hundreds of knitters from across the country in Nottingham’s Albert Hall on Monday (January 30) to knit a giant bobble hat.
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The completed hat stood at 23ft tall, 20 ft wide with a 1m tall pompom on top, and was made to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of innocent’s longstanding Big Knit partnership with Age UK.
Since it launched in 2003, the Big Knit has seen over 11million tiny hats placed on innocent’s smoothie bottles with 25p of every behatted bottle sold going to the charity to support the elderly.
Amy celebrated the event, which she attended with two of her friends, by getting a tattoo on her leg on Tuesday evening.
The inking was done by Shea Jackson, who has tattooed pop singer Ed Sheeran, etching an Irish symbol and the Rolling Stones tongue onto his skin.
Amy already has many tattoos, including mushy peas in a nod to her hometown of Nottingham, a city famed for being the home of knitting after producing the first ever knitting machine in the 16th Century.
Amy says the tattoo will also commemorate her late grandmother, Kathleen Lawrence, who she knew as ‘mama’.
She said: “My mama would roll her eyes whenever I walked in with a new tattoo, but deep down she loved the mushy peas dedication.
“That’s why I wanted to do something special, to celebrate a special day as a reminder on the hard days, when I feel sad, that something beautiful came out of her death.
“She wanted to help others and what better way than through a tattoo to remember.”
Kathleen was a keen knitter, and Amy took up knitting four days after her death in tribute to her beloved grandma.
She has since created a foundation known as Kathleen’s Legacy Blankets, inspired by her grandmother, which creates knitted blankets ‘filled with love’ for palliative care patients.
Now 60 Kathleen’s Legacy Blankets will have been made and donated with the original aim having only been to make ten.
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