Stocking Hats For Preemies––

Homesteads Knitters Give Babies A Head-Start

By Dottie Evans

Kerry Cardinal, resident services coordinator at The Homesteads in Newtown, has got a thriving little cottage industry called the Neo Knitters, and while the small group of volunteers and residents are not making any money, the benefits for everyone concerned are substantial.

For the past two years, several dedicated women have met Tuesday afternoons at the Homesteads, which is an assisted living facility located at 166 Mt Pleasant Road. Their purpose is not only fellowship but also the production and manufacture of warm knitted hats for premature babies that are born at Danbury Hospital.

 “We put out about 50 hats every two or three months, just enough to fill a shirt box,” said Mr Cardinal on February 10, as he led a visitor into the kitchen where the women were working.

“Then we deliver them to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Danbury Hospital, where they are washed and used right away,” he said, adding that the nurses, doctors, and families of the tiny newborns are delighted to have them.

On this particular afternoon, four women, Louise Guisti, Janet McGill, Ella Ruble and Olga Nesic, were seated around an oak table chatting while they knitted. Though they looked up to say hello, their fingers busy with needles and yarn never stopped moving. Inch by inch, the tiny, colorful hats began to take shape on their needles as they pulled more yarn off the balls, and cast the stitches onto the circular needles.

Ms Guisti, a retired nurse and expert needle-worker, spoke for the group.

“It takes about an hour and a half to knit one hat. Except for Olga. She can make one in half an hour,” she said, looking at her friend at the end of the table.

Olga Nesic was a visitor to America from Yugoslavia, and this was the second year she had joined the group as a guest of Ms Guisti. She had come to America in December to visit her son, and would be leaving again at the end of February to return to her home in the village of Knicanin, near Belgrade.

“Olga does not speak English well, but she can knit circles around the rest of us,” Ms Guisti said.

Indeed, Olga Nesic is a veritable knitting machine. Her needles fly so fast one cannot even see the separate stitches going onto the needles, and she uses several different colors at once by carrying them along on separate needles as she goes.

 “What Olga can do –– it’s a lost art. She doesn’t even look. She knitted 34 hats for us in just two weeks,” Mr Cardinal said with appreciation and a certain amount of awe.

Every Baby Is Different –– So Is Every Hat

 In the same way that each premature baby is already an individual, each tiny knitted hat made by the Homesteads knitters is unique.  Though the shapes and sizes are fairly uniform, the colors and patterns seem to be endlessly variable.

 Ms Guisti explained the way each hat is begun.

 “We start with 56 stitches on round number 5 needles, and we don’t use wool because some babies are allergic to it. We use the softest pre-washed acrylic. When we get to the top of the hat, we switch to number 4 needles, and then we add the pompoms,” she said.

 “As for the pattern, well, it’s in our heads because we’ve done it so many times,” she added.

“We usually don’t vary it, except for Olga who is so skillful that she makes her own patterns and designs and incorporates many colors at once,” Ms Guisti said.

 Louise Guisti was actually the person who started the Neo Knitters group at the Homesteads in Newtown. She lives in Arsdsley, N.Y., near Scarsdale, but she has a daughter living on Obtuse Road in Newtown named Gina Wolfman, and it is her granddaughter, Sophie Wolfman, who was the reason she made her first preemie hat.

 “When my granddaughter was born in October 2000, she weighed only two pounds. She was born two months early,” explained Ms Guisti.

 The doctor in the White Plains Hospital Center where Sophie was being cared for advised Ms Guisti’s daughter to come every day to the Neo Natal Unit to hold the baby and rock her. He advised all the mothers and fathers of preemies to do this.

 “One day, my daughter couldn’t make it so I came instead. I noticed all these beautiful little babies were wearing these very sterile-looking white caps to keep their heads warm. The hats seemed so impersonal. And the whole neonatal unit where they were kept –– with the incubators, the tubes, the lights, and all the hospital machinery –– it just seemed so overwhelming.”

 Ms Guisti wanted to do something for her granddaughter that would be an expression of her love, to give her a sense that even though she wasn’t home yet, in her family’s eyes she was unique and special.

 “I had always knitted. I learned it from my mother,” Ms Guisti said.

So she made a little hat for Sophie, and then she decided the other babies in the preemie unit should have knitted hats also.

“That’s how it started. The nurses and the families love them. For the families, they become heirlooms, one of the first personal bits of clothing that the babies take home with them and keep forever.”

Looking at the size of those tiny hats makes you appreciate how small they once were, she said.

“We hit a milestone this fall, when my daughter called to say that Sophie had finally made the charts,” Ms Guisti said referring to how much her granddaughter had grown.

Mr Cardinal, also a father of young children, knows how much love has gone into the making of these hats, and he hopes the Homesteads Neo Knitters group will continue to grow.

“We could use more volunteers. Maybe someone who crochets could join,” he said like the true entrepreneur, always looking to expand.