About a year ago, a member of my local Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers organised a charity crafting day in aid of the homeless. It was great fun, by the way, and whoever organised it, I'd be up for another one any time!
Anyway, there was a man from the charity (to my shame I have forgotten which charity it was, except it was Northampton-based) who gave us a very interesting talk. He said that hypothermia was a real killer for people sleeping rough, because many are new to the streets and not prepared for the night cold. He said that, if you wanted to save their lives, it could be as simple as giving out woolly hats and flasks of hot soup.
I volunteered on the spot to knit some hats. I was learning to spin, how hard could it be? Well, it turned out that my spinning at the time too uneven. My knitting skills were pre-intermediate, and I couldn't compensate for the wildly varying thickness of this overspun, underplied yarn. So the hats didn't get knitted, and I felt a bit of a fraud.
A year later and my daughter has joined the Church. She asked me very sweetly what I would be giving up for Lent. I don't have a lot of really evil vices, certainly none that it would be easy to give up for a month. After a day or so of puzzling the question I replied "I'm not giving up anything! I'm going to knit the homeless a dozen hats!" After all, my spinning is now quite even now, I can spin faster than I can knit so I have a stash of yarn that wants busting. I have even learned to knit in the round. Time to finally put my needles where my mouth is.
Then I started wondering: what kind of hats do homeless people want? The kind that a) stop them from freezing to death and b) don't attract muggers. Because homeless people get mugged. They get mugged quite a lot. Are you shocked by that? I was shocked. As if being homeless and penniless isn't bad enough, there are people prepared to rough you up and nick your knitwear.
Very warm and largely unattractive knitwear seems to be called for. My stash yarn being mostly double knitting weight, I opted to double it and call it "chunky", which I would normally knit with 6 mm needles. I knit it with 5 mm needles, partly because I don't own 6 mm circulars, and partly because that would give a firm fabric. Firm knitted fabrics are more wind and rain proof than drapey ones, which must be a consideration if you are sleeping rough.
I'm knitting watchcaps (the Canadians call them "toques"), which want a bit of stretch. I don't know many stitch patterns, but I googled "thermal knitting" and found a waffle stitch tutorial. Waffle stitch looks warm and should have a bit of stretch in both directions. It's simple and looks rather attractive. Waffle stitch it is then.
How big is the average homeless person's head? I started off making hats to fit me because, well, my head is always to hand for reference. Then it occurred to me that a large proportion of the short-term homeless are ex-army. Blokes with big heads? My husband has a big head, and so he became my next hat model.
What about teenagers? Many rough sleepers are teenagers who have been kicked out of the house following a domestic tiff and have nowhere to sleep until things calm down and they can go back home. Fortunately I own a couple of teenagers, so they became hat models too.
As long as I knit top down, and stop knitting when my hat fits a family member and looks warm, yet mildly silly (think of your Grandma's tea-cosy) then I figure it's good enough to be seen on the streets of Northampton. Each hat took about 120g of yarn, and had a turn-up of about 3 inches over the ears, so that's a considerable thick layer of wool over the ears. With the turn-up turned down, they have a bit of a balaclava vibe going on. If I were sleeping rough, I would want to sleep in one of these hats.
It turned out, at 120g per hat for a dozen hats, that was more yarn than was in my stash. I've some good jumper yarn that I'm rather proud of, but I draw the line at using that to knit hats. I didn't think this one through properly.
Fortunately I have a stash of fleeces that also needs busting. I selected some Cheviot, some Dorset and some White Faced Woodland, carded up some rolags and got spinning. After months of spinning double knitting it's not easy to spin thicker. After a couple of days of frustration I achieved a woollen spun aran weight 2 ply, which is thinner than I was hoping for. I googled "why is it hard to spin thick?" and found a tutoral by Abby Franquemont which advised me to make it into 3-ply if I wanted bulky, spongy yarn. 3-plied yarn is naturally spongier than 2-ply yarn, provided the fibre has lots of "sproing" in it. Well, I guess the thicker and spongier the yarn, the warmer the hat will be. And my fibre certainly has "sproing". So I'll try making a 3-ply yarn next, and hope to finally match the "chunky" fabric I created by knitting with two strands together of my double knitting.
The first hats were somewhat strange, badly proportioned with poorly thought-out stitch patterns, while I was working out my style. My family chuckled indulgently. Six hats later they are starting to steal hats out of the pile, announcing that they will go nicely with their favourite jackets. I take this as high praise. My hats look so warm and stylish that my teenagers are prepared to be seen out in public with them, despite the risk of meeting a homeless person wearing exactly the same hat.
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