Having grown up Lutheran, I have fond memories of playing under the long wooden tables in our church’s activity hall as my mother set up her sewing machine above me. She gathered there with other women of the church to spend an afternoon sewing quilts for Lutheran World Relief. My mother, a quiet woman with her own fiery heart (she had my sisters and me write letters to save the whales), had definite opinions about how the quilts should be assembled. She insisted on putting batting between the quilt layers, even though they were bound for very warm climates, because it would get cold at night. She used her brightest remnants for the quilts, because people who had so little needed something cheerful as well as warm. She and the other women never stood on street corners with placards, nor had they ever ridden a bus to a protest. But in their own quiet way, they gathered to take a stand for something they believed in.

With their own hands and their precious time, they sewed solutions, not for complex problems like poverty, but for real people — cold people, sad people — whom they could help. And they dove into this task with the passion, determination, and the resourcefulness of women — workers, wives, and mothers — who juggled everything and still found time to save the world.

Thirty years later and no doubt inspired on some level by this memory, I sought out another community of quiet activists with the same passion to change the world but with a different medium: knitting. My goal was to write a book that celebrated these “charity knitters,” who, like the quilters from my childhood, use a favorite hobby to warm and soothe people in their communities and around the world. I interviewed dozens of women — and they were mostly women — who had founded and were running charity knitting programs. More

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