LOCAL knitters are being drafted in to create a giant shoal of herring as part of a new exhibition heading to Fisherrow Community Centre this spring.

A total of 1,000 woolly fish are needed for the Follow The Herring display, which honours the lives of the Herring Lassies, who travelled the east coast of Scotland and England.

The groups of female workers followed the route of the herring boats, gathering the catch from the fishermen at dawn and gutting, salting and packing them at the incredible rate of 60 fish a minute to ensure they arrived at market fresh.

It was a hard life of seasonal work, as the women left their villages to go south, following the boats on land.

And the knitted fish, created by volunteers from the county, will follow in their footsteps as the exhibition goes on the road from Musselburgh down to Hastings, the end of the Herring Lassies route.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a 20ft coble boat, which has been cloaked in a knitted coat, with sails also made of wool.

The exhibition will be on at the community centre for one week in May, ahead of a production of Get Up and Tie Your Fingers at The Brunton.

The stage show looks at the lives of three women against the backdrop of the 1881 Eyemouth fishing disaster, still the worst fishing disaster to date in Britain.

The Coat for a Boat project, which created the centrepiece of the exhibition, began in 2009 and was carried out by the North East Maritime Trust and the Materialistics, a knitting group from south Tyneside.

The organisers of Follow The Herring, The Guild of Lillians and The Customs House, in South Shields, hope East Lothian knitters will produce enough fish to meet their 1,000-strong shoal and go on tour.

For more information and to download the knitting pattern, visit www.customshouse.co.uk/followtheherring