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Dec. 14--A single strand becomes a stitch; a stitch becomes a row; a row becomes a doll-sized hat; a hat becomes, just possibly, the difference between life and death.
Those strands, binding charity and love into tangible form, also gathered a group of women at the Knitting Sisters yarn shop in Williamsburg on Sunday to celebrate their contribution to a campaign aimed at giving babies in developing countries better odds of survival.
"Caps to the Capital" had its origins in a May report from Save the Children, which found that 70 percent of the world's 4 million newborn deaths each year could be prevented if mothers and children in poor countries had access to simple health measures. Those include antibiotics to fight infections, immunizations against tetanus, training for skilled birth attendants, and education on breastfeeding and basic care such as keeping newborns warm and dry. Several media reports noted that something as simple as a knitted cap could help save a new life.
Save the Children teamed up with the Warm Up America! Foundation, a charity that provides knitted and crocheted items to people in need. The initiative asks volunteers to make a cap and write President Bush in support of increased international assistance for programs that offer basic care to mothers and infants. Save the Children is collecting caps at its Connecticut headquarters to deliver to the president in Washington, D.C., early in 2007. After that they'll be distributed overseas.
When the women who run Knitting Sisters heard about the project, they took it personally.
"We just thought, 'Oh my gosh, we can do something,'" said Kat England, who owns the store along with Cathy Gill and Carol Moninger.
They introduced the project to customers in the fall and hosted monthly meetings at the store to work on the caps. If someone needed instructions or a quick knitting lesson, they provided them.
"Knitters are givers by nature -- you have to remind them to knit for themselves," England said. "It's such a natural connection to charities."
Word spread, fingers flew, and the heap of tiny hats began to accumulate.
When Knitting Sisters opened Sunday morning, there were 599 caps in an overflowing collection of baskets and bins in the yarn shop's classroom.
"We said, 'We've got to go knit a cap," to make it a round number, Kat said, but then someone remembered the sample they'd made to show customers and retrieved it from the stockroom.
600.
Someone dropped off a contribution from their home church in Minnesota -- a few hundred caps knit by the members there. They started a new pile, separate from the already-counted caps.
Around 2:30, with a small crowd gathered to celebrate over hot cider and cupcakes, Kat announced the new total.
921.
They held a drawing for the closest estimate. The prize: A book of baby hat patterns.
Before Kat could finish announcing the winner, someone came through the door with another bag.
"Here's 15 more."
They plan to mail several boxes of caps to Save the Children on the day after Christmas, to avoid the swamp of holiday shipping. The national deadline is Jan. 2.
"I don't see how we possibly couldn't hit 1,000," Kat told the group -- that was the goal they'd set when they started the project.
The caps kept coming.
989.
Around 3:30, Rachel Ingalls walked through the door, holding a bag of caps.
1,005.
The project joined people together as surely as a row of knitted stitches. Friends, mothers, daughters, sisters were united by the work their hands -- and hearts -- did.
The size of the caps is striking. These babies, born into desperate poverty, are tiny. Imagine an orange in one hand, a grapefruit in the other. That's the difference in cap size for these children and an average healthy newborn.
Denise McCoy of Newport News is a pediatric nurse -- she's seen babies this small, and that pulled her in.
With her Sunday were her neighbor, Alma Liggons, who brought along her 13-month-old son, Taysham, and mother, Enid Guardiola.
Enid's the knitter in the family -- she recently moved here from Panama, and Denise saw someone else with something to give to the project.
"I saw that she crocheted, so I just went over and talked to her about it."
Alma, translating for her mom, said Enid started making caps while her small grandson napped during the day. "In one week, she made 40."
The one who made everybody cry was Dee Sulenski of Toano.
Dee and her 146 caps. Those caps got her through some dark days, giving her a project that symbolized life and a respite from grief. Dee lost a 58-year-old cousin, her last surviving relative, to cancer in July. Not long later, another friend fell prey to the disease.
She helped care for both of them in their final days. And somewhere in there, she learned about the caps project.
"I was feeling empty," she said. But when she got the e-mail from the shop, "I thought, 'I can do that.'"
She set herself a goal: 124 caps, the sum of her cousin's and friend's ages. She reached it and kept going.
"It's hard to express how this helped me," she said Sunday. "It really provided some kind of healing outlet."
Sue Maida kept returning to the table heaped with caps, lifting one, then another from the baskets to admire the colors, the softness, the delicate rows of stitches. Save the Children provides a pattern for a knit or crocheted cap, but contributors are encouraged to use any style they like. These caps were as varied as their creators.
"This is like candy for knitters," Sue said.
She has "no idea" how many caps she made. As she completed a few, she'd drop them by the shop. Like many of the other participants, though, something about the babies kept tugging at her heart. She thought about her small granddaughter.
"I've been knitting baby sweaters for her for two years now," she said. "I was stunned when I read that so many infants die within 24 hours." The store's owners plan to carry the charitable knitting into the new year -- they'll host a monthly charity night, with a new project each time. Patterns and lessons will be available, and they'll collect finished caps, scarves and other items to distribute to the proper place, or to local homeless shelters or clothing closets.
"This need is going to go on," Kat said.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Daily Press, Newport News, Va.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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