In the midst of COVID-19, I was attending Carleton Univeristy in Ottawa, ON. I was playing on the Varsity Hockey Team, doing online school, and living in a residence isolated with my roommates.

With wanting to give back in some way to the Ottawa community around Christmas, I came up with the idea to make knitted hockey socks into hats - I soon learned that idea wasn’t going to be too feasible. Instead, I was told to try simply using fleece - so I did just that.

My grandma had given me her old sewing machine in August so I could sew scrunchies during my downtime in COVID during the year, so I taught myself how to sew throughout the summer/fall.

I set a goal to make 30 hats and mittens to hand out in the Byward Market before Christmas and to raise $100. I posted a video with these details to my social media account and that is when it all began.

The next day, I had hundreds of dollars of donations already and the media coordinator from my hockey team posted a synopsis of what I was doing online and that is when the media helped me take off to where I am today!

I went and bought some fabric, got to work, and the rest is history!