Carolyn Sparling knows she can’t solve homelessness. But through her annual holiday hat project, she can show those who are homeless that someone cares about them.

A lifelong Lynnwood resident, Sparling has spent the past 18 years making hats for those in need. She was inspired by her aunt, who was involved with an Interfaith effort to care for a small group of homeless women.

Sparling decided that she should also do something for the homeless women, so she found a simple pattern for a hat. After making the hats, she decided to put things inside them. She went to the store and bought socks, gloves and snacks and curated each hat bundle.

“I felt better about the holidays, having done it,” Sparling said.

Over time, the group of women with the Interfaith effort grew and Sparling continued to make hats for for a Seattle-based Interfaith shelter called Noel House.

The shelters that she’s worked with the longest just call her the Hat Lady. In addition to Noel House, she also donates to Mary’s Place, the Everett Gospel Mission, Neighbors in Need(which is run out of Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood) and Youth Carein the University District.

Sparling notes that much has changed since she started the effort 18 years ago. “Homelessness isn’t what it is today. It was a much less visible issue. Much less visible,” she said.

Over time, as the need grew, she added more hats. After eight years, she was up to 200 hats, and then Sparling had twins. It was then that she told her family about the hat project and they all turned up at her house to help.

“That is the beginning of it taking off as kind of a life of its own,” Sparling said.

She now orders wholesale polar fleece to make the hats and scarves, orders gloves and socks at wholesale prices, and buys snacks from Costco Business Center. She orders the fleece around Halloween, starts cutting fleece a week or two before Thanksgiving and starts sewing the hats shortly after, she said.

Sparling’s  grandmother taught her how to sew when she was 3 years old. She began sewing buttons on fabric and then learned how to sew garments such as dresses and jackets. She passed on these skills to her children, who now act as floor supervisors for the hat project. When Sparling’s daughter was in Girl Scouts and her son was in Cub Scouts, the groups would come over to stuff 300 hats in an afternoon.

Sparling makes it easy for people to help. She schedules hours sometimes for people to come and help on the weekends and puts out snacks, she said.

She is currently in the final stage of the hat process, with all 1,375 hats already sewn. During the final stage, Sparling, her family and friends line a table with the hats turned upside down and stuff them with gloves, socks and a multitude of different snacks. Then, a scarf is placed over the top so it’s a wrapped bundle. Lastly, a holiday greeting card that says, “Warmest Wishes,” goes on top and it is placed in a big Ziploc bag to keep it dry.

Last weekend, volunteers stuffed 500 hats, which are then placed into bags that line the entire hallway and many of the rooms in Sparling’s home. Before the end of the week the hats will all be delivered, she said.

There are only two seams in the hat, which have a double-banded piece of fleece and a circle of fleece on the top, so they are very stretchy to fit all head sizes. There are also kid-size hats that include small ear coverings. The scarves are 8-inch-wide, 60-inch-long pieces of polar fleece so  recipients can double wrap them around their necks.

Sparling grew up in a home with a single mother, so she never thought she was that far away from homelessness.

“It’s viscerally real to me that people could be homeless at any point,” she said. “It only takes one bad thing to happen and then one other piece of uncontrollable, if you will, bad luck.”

Sparling knows she could just donate the money she uses for the hat project to a homeless shelter, but she wants people who open the package to feel like somebody cares about them.

“I don’t know how to solve homelessness,” she said. “It’s a problem that might be bigger than all of us. It’s scary. But I can make a difference to a person who gets a hat.”

— By Hannah Horiatis