Woman crochets thousands of hats for preemies



MILWAUKEE (WITI) -- Crocheting every stitch with love, that's what Kay Grall does as she makes little gifts for some special deliveries.

"I just feel that the good Lord has these babies coming and they need little hats and it always leaves a smile on the mother," says Grall.

For 30 years, Grall has been making hats for the infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Wheaton Franciscan St. Joseph Campus.

It all started with a simple request from a friend who had daughters that worked in the NICU.

"She said you know they'd like to maybe have hats there, could you make some of those hats? So I thought oh that's great because I love doing that stuff," says Grall.

The hats became so popular nurses and families started calling them granny hats.

But for all of those years Grall kept her good deed anonymous.

"The main office did not know that I was ever doing this so you know a woman can keep a secret," says Grall.

Yet after 3 decades Grall decided it was finally time to deliver the hats herself, and the staff at St. Joseph's got to meet the woman behind the granny hats.

"We just feel like she has been an angel there behind the scenes all these years and you never know when angels are going to be put in your path," says NICU Clinical Nurse Specialist Janice Ancona.

Each month Grall makes 50 hats, which means she's already donated nearly 20,000 of these adorable gifts.

"The first 10,000 they're already grown up and big and if they would go and just do something nice for somebody else that would make a lot of people in Milwaukee happy," says Grall.

Grall says she plans to continue crocheting these hats as long as she has yarn.