Words by Tess Becker
Knitting is a great pastime for people enjoy crafting. And one woman is using that skill and pastime to make hundreds of hats for premature infants.
Linda Clark does the work in memory of her late mother, who inspired her to start it after finding a basket of red yarn and a preemie hat pattern in her mother’s apartment after her death.
“She was making it for the society for babies that had heart issues, so I took the yarn, made the hats, and sent it to them,” Linda told USA Today.
Since then, Linda has been working to make hundreds of colorful crocheted hats and blankets for premature babies as well as for cancer patients, the elderly in senior living facilities, and premature babies in East Tennessee Children’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.
Over the past year, she started creating tiny graduation caps for babies leaving the NICU.
Linda taught herself to knit while she and her husband went away for missionary work, and today she can knit a preemie hat in about 20 minutes.
Today she spends about six hours a day creating a variety of colored hats for different seasons.
“I hope I'm making somebody happy, I hope I'm helping a parent deal with this,” she said.
