I made several helmet liners last fall to ship to my uncles unit in Iraq. Unfortunately someone in my family gave me the wrong address and they came back to me. I was able to send most of them over to another unit via a co-worker and saved one to resend to my uncle. Before I could get a good address for him he was brought home. My coworkers son is also on his way home…Does anyone have an address of a unit or someone that is in need of a cascade 220 black helmet liner?
Anyone still shipping helmet liners?
If you’re interested, you might go to www.adoptaussoldier.org
People there “adopt” soldiers to send letters and care packages to.
There’s also http://www.citizensam.org/ and if you want to send it to Denver, there’s this drive here – they say that even if you don’t send it in time for the drive, they’ll send it by the USO.
Thanks for the quick responses - I was looking at the Denver website and it requests superwash wool…I made my helmet liners out of old fashioned cascade 220, not superwash…should I frog it and make another set with superwash? I thought for the helmet liners we were asked to use straight up wool.
I guess it depends on whether they want to be able to machine wash it or not! 
I made mine out of plain 220 (superwash wasn’t available) as well, and marked them “hand wash only” with the label of the skein.
A-hem.
As military - shortly headed to Iraq (I think) myself - what exactly is a helmet liner FOR?? The “new” (in the last 4 years) helmets are pretty darn comfy, and don’t really need any more padding.
If it’s to soak up sweat - carry on, carry on, by all means.
Trish - the helmet liners are like baclavas (I wear them skiing when its really cold or under a motorcycle helmet when it starts getting cold). They cover the neck and face of a person to protect against cold and wind. I am told that the desert can get very cold and very windy at night so there was/is a campaign to ship gators and helmet liners knit from wool (it does not burn/melt like acrylic) overseas to our soldiers. The Citizen Sam website is great and shows pictures of them.
If I can find someplace to ship them (I also asked my father as he is retired Navy) then I will make a couple more and some gators. The only issue I have with the pattern is that it seems to be for a generously sized head…either that or my head is small b/c it is too big on me.
Well, I guess that’d be one soldier we wouldn’t have to knit a hat for…keep us updated on your deployment situation, Trish.
Oh!
See, I’m not the patrolling type. So I couldn’t picture what it was for.
I will say that machine-washable is the way to go - otherwise you’re going to end up with a one-use garment. But if you warn them… Maybe.
Zina, I’m heading out in a couple weeks for a couple-four months.
I’m one of those people who use computers a lot, so I’m usually inside the fence inside the fence. I’ve never been shot at, unless you count rockets. Year before last, I was one of the few Americans in Basrah, so I worked with a lot of Brits. It was… interesting. I used to wig them out by remarking (in August) that the weather was nicer there than at home. That’d usually get a raised eyebrow and “Where the hell are you from??” See, even down south, the humidity isn’t but 30%-40% and it’s only 50C as a high - at home it’s 45C and 90% humidity.
I’ll be having fun - I’ll just drop out of sight for a while. But I’m taking my knitting, darnit! wonders how much yarn and pointy sticks she can stuff in her luggage Maybe I’ll embarrass my boss by making him ship me yarn.
Oh, make pretty little lacy things. I somehow just enjoy the mental picture of that…