Record-breaking coat of many colours

Officials at the Guiness Book of World Records have confirmed that the St George’s Church congregation in Heaviley has made the world’s biggest coat.
The coat is made up of 8,832 knitted squares and is 18 feet wide and 42 feet long. The Stockport congregation has created the biggest coat ever!
Members of the congregation spent hours making the enormous coat and they are delighted that officials from the Guinness Book of Records confirmed their gigantic achievement.
Parishioners from the church on Buxton Road will now be presented with an official certificate in a special ceremony.
Kim Regan, from the church, said: “We have been on tenterhooks waiting to hear if we had been successful and now everyone is thrilled. It feels like all our efforts have been rewarded, we can’t calculate how many hours we have spent on it.”
The 18ft 2in by 42ft 6in has beaten the existing record that was broken in the Ukraine. Church members, people from the local community and contributors from as far away as Scotland knitted all of the segments themselves.
Once the coat was completed it took ten men to carry the 26 stone garment to be displayed in the church. They needed ropes to get it into position before it was used as the backdrop for a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
The church are now planning  on unpicking the coat so that it can be sent to Africa and used for blankets.
Kim said: “It’s a shame in a way that it will be unpicked but it is so big we have nowhere to keep it. We can’t hang it in church as not every bride would want to be married with it on display.
“And it’s good that the coat can be used to help other people. We have got the bug now for world records so people should watch this space.”