Caps for a Cause

What do you get when you combine a small group of mothers and grandmothers, a little bit of yarn, a large amount of motivation and some chai? A knitting group-with a purpose. Founders Sudha Pai and Richa Gupta started the group, called Knitting and Crocheting With Love (KCWL), in November 2016 as they were looking to create a hobby.

“At the time I was thinking of what to do with myself now that I’m an empty nester. I wanted to create something and I wanted to see if anyone would be interested.” said Gupta. “So Sudha picked up on it because [she] had been thinking about doing something like this. It was before Diwali, and she told me ‘Lets get started!’”

Pai talked of the inspiration for the group. “ We wanted to do something for the community, and so we picked up on hobbies from our school days such as sewing and crocheting.”

The group started as a population of 5 ladies, Indian “aunties” as they’re known, making caps in the basement of one of the members. They contacted organizations and found Knots of Love, a California-based non-profit that collects caps to send to hospitals all over the United States for cancer patients going through chemotherapy.

“I have a couple of personal experiences that led me to this. A dear friend of mine lost her battle to cancer. After seeing her go through so many struggles, I wanted to do something for people like her.” said Gupta.

Through word-of-mouth and a WhatsApp group, KCWL expanded from 5 to 35 members, and has been growing ever since. This now includes Skype sessions with friends in California, and even inspired the creation of a group by friends in India. “When we started, we were not very strict with the quality of the caps. But when we reached 2,700 caps, somewhere along the way, we started getting really strict with the way the caps were going to be made.”

Despite the attention to detail and high quality of the caps, there is no prior experience needed to be part of the group. In fact, they embrace first-timers. “No one is an expert. The best knitter or crochter can learn from a beginner. We learn from each other.”

Funding for such materials as yarn comes from the nominal annual fee asked of members and any other donations made to the group. Members bring their own needles and crocheting hooks, as well as their own styles of creating the caps. “It’s funny because in the first session we had, we got all the yarn and knitting patterns together, thinking we would start off slow. One of the patterns we had was a difficult one. Everyone ended up having a different design, and so they had their own interpretation of the pattern. That was the beauty of it all.”
So far this year the group has made around 1,600 caps, but plans to reach 2,018 caps made by the end of the year, since it is the year 2018. As for the vision for KCWL in the years ahead? “ We’d really like to become a bigger organization to spread the word.” said Gupta. “Because it is benefiting both the crafter and the user we want to spread it as much as possible, and see more people, young and old, take up this hobby.”

“We started by helping cancer patients, but we are not only helping patients, we’re helping ourselves. A lot of the members have had family tragedies so they knit to seek some comfort. This is what has motivated us to keep going”

If you would like to get involved or make a donation, please contact Richa Gupta and Sudha Pai at knitcrochetwithlove@gmail.com