How more than 100 volunteers painted Port Stanley red to pay respect to veterans

Residents of Port Stanley, Ont., are seeing lots of red this week, but they don’t mind at all.

The change in colour isn’t coming from the arrival of fall. Instead, it's from the roughly 15,555 knitted and crocheted poppies that have been put up across the community.

Wherever you go in the lakeside town, you you can see the poppies, whether they’re pinned up on park benches, wreathes, storefronts, signs or elsewhere. Port Stanley’s drawbridge has poppies laid over its railings, and the iconic fish-themed welcome sign is now sporting a stylish scarf made almost entirely of red yarn.

“My vision was to paint the village red. That was my whole vision, and we did so much more,” said Kathy Howarth, the Port Stanley resident that started the initiative, known as the Poppy Campaign.

“It's been such an emotional time, it really brought the community together as a group,” she said.

The Poppy Project is the culmination of thousands of hours of work split across 106 volunteers that have been working to make the flowers. Howarth said they've been working since late January, when she was inspired after seeing a similar initiative in Stratford, Ont.

“I thought, ‘Someone should do this in Port Stanley,’ but then I thought, ‘That someone could be me,'’’ Howarth said.

The initial goal for the project was to bring volunteers together to create 12,001 poppies in time for November, the extra one poppy being for the Unknown Soldier, but volunteers kept flooding in and before long Howarth had more than 15,000 flowers packed away in her basement.

Part of the push to find volunteers was handled by Jackie Valotaire, who created a Facebook group to coordinate the effort.

“We certainly knew our target was aggressive, and [even] when we ended up blowing that target out of the water, so many ladies were asking, ‘How many more do you need?’’ Valotaire said.

According to Valotaire, volunteers came to the organizers continuously with new batches of poppies, and some even brought their yarn with them on vacations and worked on their poppies abroad.

The poppies each take roughly 25 minutes to make, according to Howarth, which translates to well over 6,000 hours of knitting and crocheting across all 15,000 flowers.

To put all those hours of work on display, volunteers spent the morning of Nov. 1 spreading the poppies across town.

Howarth and Valotaire said the response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive, with some people turning the challenge of finding as many poppies as possible into a game.

To celebrate their effort and accomplishment, dozens of volunteers and supporters of the movement packed into Branch 410 of the Royal Canadian Legion in Port Stanley on Monday. It’s the same place where many of the poppies now on display were created.

Among the people there was Anne Versteeg, the chair of the local poppy campaign at the Legion.

“I’m just astounded by the amount of work that went into doing this. It’s not just the knitting, but the work involved organizing, having people come together, hand-tying those poppies together onto fishing nets,” Versteeg said.

Versteeg said she’s proud to be able to see one of the most striking uses for the poppies, a full sheet of the flowers blanketing the railing of the Legion’s second-floor balcony.

“It just gladdens my heart that we've got so many people in today's world that are still thinking of the poppy campaign and what it means,” she said.

As residents enjoy the splash of colour, and reflect on what poppies are meant to symbolize, Howarth said she’s already looking forward to next year.

“I’ve got some ideas. I’m looking forward to bringing it forward to the group,” she said. “I’ve been very, very fortunate that everyone has been so supportive so far.”