Pom poms and crocheted poll data: Public document election with arts and crafts

Social media users have been documenting the General Election in quirky ways, from crocheting poll trackers to making results maps using pom poms.

Sarra Jenkins, 38, who is based in Loughborough, has combined two interests – crafting and politics – to create a crocheted opinion poll tracker to chronicle the election.

Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, the Green Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP) have been represented on the tracker through appropriately coloured wool.

Sarra Jenkins has made a crocheted polling tracker (Sarra Jenkins/PA)

Ms Jenkins, who teaches sixth-form students politics and started the project on May 25, told the PA news agency: “I’ve spent quite a lot of time this year looking at opinion polls with my students.

“I thought it would be something quite fun to track and a way to engage students during the election.

“Each stitch in length is a percent and I just worked down 100 stitches so I didn’t have to do anything crazy with the maths – the black lines on it are nothing other than demarking it, so it just makes it a bit easier to read.

“If the polls don’t add up to 100, I just black out the bottom for other parties.”

Politics teacher Sarra Jenkins started the project on May 25 (Sarra Jenkins/PA)

When it was announced there would be a General Election, opinion polls from various organisations appeared on her X feed and she checked which ones were members of the British Polling Council (BPC) – which promotes transparency in polling.

“I then developed a list of about a dozen that seemed to be the ones coming up over and over again so then, as the speed of the election picked up, I would just check their X feed daily and see if they’d released anything on there,” she added.

These include polls from market research firm YouGov and public opinion consultancy Deltapoll.

Ms Jenkins tends to record results from multiple polls daily.

She has spent hours crocheting with “whatever wool I had lying around the house” and did not anticipate how much she would need.

The project in the early stages (Sarra Jenkins/PA)

“It is really irritating because there is a colour change for Labour because I ran out of the wool,” she said.

“You’re constantly adding up the polling to get to 100. But when you’re working back up from the black, I sometimes got to the top and realised I was a stitch out, and I’ve had to unravel the whole row and re-do it.”

She said the tracker “was not really something I anticipated people grabbing on to” on social media, adding: “It’s been really sweet and nice to see.”

On July 4, she will be taking a break from the project to count votes in her constituency – Loughborough – but will pick up her crochet hook again the day after to create all the seats around the outside of the tracker and then turn it into a lined tote bag.

Ed Peacock, 39, and his wife Charlotte, 42, who live in Cardiff, plan to stay up throughout the night to fill out the election map using hand-made pom poms, which they also did for the 2019 and 2017 elections.

Ed and Charlotte Peacock’s election map as it looks currently (Ed Peacock/PA)

Mr Peacock, a dog walker, told PA: “Hopefully we have enough pom poms of the right colours ready as we don’t want to have to be making more on the night.

“Fortunately a lot of people from all over have helped, sending us in bags of pom poms.”

The couple will have “exactly three beers on the night” and are optimistic they can “complete the map with a limited amount of chaos”.

Ed Peacock is documenting the General Election via a pom pom map (Ed Peacock/PA)

They have had “various levels of success previously” creating their pom pom map, with the idea initially sparked in 2017 after they “had a sherry-heavy Sunday roast while workshopping ideas”.

“2017 was quite exciting for a group of left-leaning South Wales people so inevitably we had a few too many beers and had to give up (at) about 4am,” said Mr Peacock.

The Peacocks’ 2017 pom pom election map (Ed Peacock/PA)

“The 2019 election everybody was deflated by 10pm because of the exit poll – we went for a while into the night anyway.

“This year the pub we used to do it in is closed so it’s going to be round a friend’s house. We’re hoping to make it all the way through the night this time.”