YOUR SPACE: Hats-4-Hope warms 1,000 tiny heads

One thousand hand-loomed hats.

One thousand tiny heads.

One $10 Christmas gift.

One teenage girl.

“I named it Hats-4-Hope,” says Suzy Luff.

She’s the teenage girl.

Suzy started the project to warm the tiny heads of babies in Memorial Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

“They go to the ones having problems,” she says. “The hats are so small that they fit the premature ones very well.”

On a recent nippy holiday break morning, when many teens were still in bed, Suzy was off to the hospital with baskets of knitted hats, her fourth Hats-4-Hope delivery in 18 months. Somewhere in the batch of 250 pastel and festive hats was No. 1,000.

“My goal was 1,000 hats. I was going to try to reach it by the end of my high school career,” she says.

She’s a sophomore, with no plans of stopping.

The project began with a knitting hat loom her mom gave her for Christmas two years ago. It’s a simple round plastic ring with pegs.

“A lady at my mom’s work was making the hats to send to Peru,” Suzy says. “I wanted to make something for babies in Colorado Springs.”

The infants get more than one of her hats. Suzy gives each her prayers, as well.

She puts a tag with a Biblical verse on each hat from James 1:17: “Every good and perfect gift is from above.”

Regardless of faith, she just wants them to know that somebody cares.

“My hats are so the babies can have hope and they know there is hope out there. I pray for the babies when I make them.”

She reached 1,000, despite a rough start. Her first attempts with the loom weren’t always pretty.

“I’ve made bad hats,” she said. “The first one was awful. It was way long. It was disfigured. It was very funny to look at. I still have it, so I can see the progress I’ve made.”

Suzy quickly mastered the loom and since receiving her gift, she has made more than 200 hats. The rest were loomed by peers she recruited at Colorado Springs Christian School and her church.

“I went to classrooms. I had a little hat party to help them learn how to make hats,” she says. “I taught all these girls. I have a couple of guys and they are some of the more devoted ones.”

Her mom also makes hats.

And that lady who made hats for Peru? She now makes hats for Suzy.

“Almost all the yarn has been donated,” Suzy says. “Some donate money to buy more yarn and looms. I don’t have to worry, ‘Oh, do I have enough money to go out and buy that?’ ”

No telling what would have happened if her mom would have given her a socket wrench set instead.

Contact her at: Bballgrl4031@juno.com

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