Warm Hats

Unless you’re totally off the news grid, you know that it’s cold in much of the country right now. Where I live, we got some snow yesterday… maybe 4-5”? Enough to cancel public school today, but not enough to shut down the town.The bigger news is the temperature, which is at its peak right now at 17° F and should drop to about 8°F tonight.  This is a dangerous time to be homeless. I was reminded of this last month when my friend and colleague, Chris Fee, published this piece on The HuffPost Blog:

Our National Shame

Please take a minute to read it. A few days later, the piece appeared again in our local newspaper, The Gettysburg Times, with a couple of extra paragraphs at the end about a local organization called Gettysburg C.A.R.E.S. It is hard to find those extra paragraphs online so I’m pasting them here for you to read:

Some of the knitters in my local group were motivated to redirect holiday knitting energy for a few days and create some warm hats. Today I was able to take six very warm hats to Gettysburg C.A.R.E.S., where the director assured me they would be put to good use immediately. You can see that they are sized (and colored) to work for a range of guests, including, perhaps, the toddler who is using the daybed in the resource center for daytime naps.

We picked very warm yarns – either wool or wool blends (there is some alpaca and mohair in the pile, too). Note the cuffed brims on a couple of hats, which provide double warmth. We had heard that some shelters only accept acrylic items because they are machine-washable, but the Gettysburg C.A.R.E.S.director values the warmth of wool as much as we do and said they would happily accept woolen items.

We’ll be knitting more warm hats, and perhaps some warm mittens or scarves or cowls, too.

P.S. – I used the free pattern, Vegamot, for both my hats. It is excellently written and makes a very handsome unisex hat. I also like that “vegamot” is the Norse word for “crossroads,” which is fitting.