You remember pussyhats, right? Pink knitted hats with little ears, seas of them, at women’s marches from sea to shining sea basically. I knit a couple of them. So did, apparently, everybody else. I remember thinking, that... is a lot of hats. And also, that is a lot of knitters!
I sort of developed a hat tooth from that. Sort of specifically a Harry Potter hat tooth, to be honest. Okay really specifically, a Hufflepuff hat tooth; adding a stripe was easy enough. I learned from Brooke how to shape the crown of a hat, which meant knitting in the round.
Then Nina gifted me with all her knitting things including her yarn stash, and then there was this little miracle where it yielded not one but two Slytherin hats, three if you count Abby’s. Abby is a little plastic penguin; I made her a teeny pussyhat, too. At some point I decided to turn the whole stash into hats.
I mean, you know how a stash sometimes sits around: you can’t bring yourself to toss it, but what can you make from a little of this and a little of that? Well, a hat! Particularly a striped hat! And knitting a hat is a nice thing to do when you’re watching TV or hanging out with your friends watching football.
Oh I forgot to say, these are hats for the homeless. Incidentally, I did not attend the Women’s March; crowds give me anxiety. After the election I started volunteering at a foot care clinic for the homeless, and that’s where I was during the march.
One thing I’ve learned from foot clinic is, you can’t show up with just one hat. You don’t want to give these folks another experience of scarcity, it’s nicer to provide a feeling of surplus or, even better, choice. And I was thinking about all the knitters that all those pussyhats represented and wondering if they had stashes that they would like to knit up? You could donate your hats to your local homeless shelter, or send them c/o Care For Friends who runs the foot clinic as well as a number of other programs:
Hats For Friends
c/o Care For Friends
530 W Fullerton Parkway
Chicago, IL 60614
Links for the PDF files are here for the outside and here for the inside. Pro-tip: if you copy them to a single double-sided page, they should fold into a nice little quarter-sheet pamphlet. Eeee. Should. The business, though, i.e., the hat instructions, are on the inside sheet.
And now, we wait. Or well, I wait and knit!
