One Woman. One Year. One Hundred Hats.

Tweet

Share It!

Print
Email

Aspiring bloggers, take note:

This is how you carve a niche!

Robyn Devine is handy with a knitting needle, but it’s her blog’s tagline that first caught our attention: One Woman. One Year. One Hundred Hats. As mottos go, it’s perfectly succint. Don’t you just want to learn more?

In some ways, that motto is pretty much the whole story. Beauty in simplicity.

Yet, there is indeed more. One Hundred Hats is more than just a vanity project; Robyn donates all of her hats to charity. She’s a passionate knitter, picking up the habit in Chicago and taking it with her when she moved to Omaha at the age of 21.

Ever since her quest to knit one hundred hats in a year started, she’s become comfortable being, as she puts it, “the girl with the yarn.” However, when Robyn says, “[You] really can change people’s live with knitting,” she’s not just referring to her own. For those in need, the gift of knitting is the gift of warmth, as compassionate a gesture as it is vital. Thus far, Robyn has donated all of her hats to Nest: Maine, a site which connects knitters with people in need of winter clothing.

In the past, Robyn has donated items to Creighton Hospital’s NICU, The Ghana Project, and Warm Woolies (before they closed at the end of 2009), and is always on the lookout for more deserving organizations.

To hear her tell it, anyone with $15 and a little desire can easily knit. Though Robyn has reduced her new-pattern-to-finished-hat time down to a svelte two days, she claims that even the neophyte knitter can have a finished product in less than a week.

She cites Ravelry as an excellent place for beginners to turn, as it helps connect knitters, keeps track of what you’re knitting, and finds new knitting patterns. Stephanie, humorist/knitter at The Yarn Harlot—"probably the most widely read knitting blog"—is a favorite, along with Vickie Howell and Amanda Soule, two "amazing knitters" who both do a lot of work for charity (for more free charity patterns, check out Bev’s Country Cottage—it must have taken tons of work to get this many free pattern links in one place!).

Robyn recently launched Knit Omaha, a local knitting charity, and frequently receives donations to her One Hundred Hats project. In addition, there are local knitters meetings at the Omaha Whole Foods (10020 Regency Circle), Wednesday nights, right by the coffee bar! Stop by, and comment below to tell us how it went!

In the interview below, Robyn mentions: Brown Sheep Company, Inc., String of Purls, Personal Threads, A Stitch in Crime

An Omaha.net writer since 2008, Jordy freely admits he's waiting for his golden parachute "anxiously." He microblogs @jordyclements + macroblogs jordyclements.com