RACINE - Briana Hall pulled on the braided ties of her new hat.

"I never had one like this before," she said.

On top of her long, dark curls was a hand-knit hat. She'd never had a hat with ear-flaps and tassels before, she said. She'd also never worn one that had been knit by hand.

Briana, 4, is one of about 15 people at HALO, 2000 DeKoven Ave., sporting new hats, courtesy of knitters in Florida.

Margaret Espaillat, of Orlando, Fla., said someone in their knitting group came across the Lands' End Feel Good/One Heart Warming Families challenge to get 25,000 hand-knit or crocheted hats to homeless men, women and children by the end of 2009.

"It's 96 degrees here in Orlando," Espaillat said. "We love to knit, and we've got a big homeless population here, but ears in the north are much colder than they are in Florida."

Maria Vasquez, Briana's mother, also got a hat from the bunch. Hers is knit from a bulky pink yarn, and is very stretchy.

"I think they're very, very cute, and quite warm," she said.

It can be tough to find hats for her family, she said. Her children need larger sizes than she can usually find in the children's department. Until getting these hats, Vasquez said, they didn't have hats yet this year.

She was surprised that these women took the time to knit, and send, the hats from so far away and wondered how the Orlando knitters found HALO.

Espaillat said they looked through the Warming Families Web site, and saw no one was making any hats in Wisconsin. She searched online and found HALO. They liked that it was a shelter that served everyone - men, women and children - and they started knitting.

"There are not very many of us," she said. "We sent up 17 hats (a few weeks) ago. We're madly knitting. We're having a good time showing off our finished products and are hoping that somebody likes them when they arrive."

Related

• The misfit hat finally finds a home
• On the Web
• charity knitters sa 1.jpg