"You wouldn't believe how much heat your hair keeps in," Don Fulthorp explained, seated in his Chilliwack apartment.
When Don visited the doctor one morning in 2010 for a check-up, he found himself on the operating table that same afternoon.
Diagnosed with an aggressive intestinal cancer, surgeons urgently removed 14 inches of his upper intestine. Without that surgery, he wouldn't have survived another two weeks.
It's tough to describe what chemotherapy is like to someone who's never experienced it. But Don held his thumb and pointer finger a few millimetres apart and said, "I was that far away from kicking the bucket."
In effort to keep warm during treatment sessions, "I'd have as many as eight blankets on me at times," he recalled.
He had worn a $10 knit hat that his sister purchased from his treatment facility to cover his hair loss, but he witnessed many patients, often mere children, shivering with exposed, bald heads.
For some, that's their preference. For others, a knit cap is luxury they simply can't afford.
Don, who has been cancer-free for two years now, wants every person to have the option.
"My grandma taught me to knit and crochet when I was young," Don said. It actually began as an effort to keep his hands occupied while recovering from a serious bout of poison ivy, to prevent him from scratching.
But as he learned to hand-make everything from hats and scarves to slippers and vests, it quickly became a favourite hobby.
As an adult, Don continued to knit and crochet in his free time as he worked through various jobs across the province. He participated in knitting clubs wherever he lived, and joined the online knitting community Ravelry.com to share advice and inspiration with fellow artisans.
As a way to continue knitting despite the development of arthritis, Don purchased his first knitting machine and thought, "this oughta do."
It took four months of book reading and YouTube tutorial watching for Don to learn the ins and outs of the complex machine. Today, having experimented with the 11 knitting machines he now owns, he's a seasoned expert.
If he operates two machines simultaneously, Don can produce five caps per day. That's a major increase in output from the one cap he'd been able to make each week by hand.
Utilizing the organized stacks of gifted and purchased yarn in every colour, Don estimated that he has produced and donated close to 1,000 caps to keep people warm when they need it most.
He delivers bags of his knitted caps to cancer patients each month, and regularly donates more to inner-city school children and local outreach organizations.
"It's something that I can do on my own time," he explained as he carefully added a line to a soft, white hat at his machine. Once the flat panel is complete, he'll link the ends, sew up the side, and gather the top, to be added to the growing donation pile.
A cone of burgundy acrylic yarn sat on the open pattern book behind him, ready to be transformed into the next batch.
His hats are machine washable, an appreciated convenience for those going through treatment. Furthermore, the thin yarn keeps you warm, but not uncomfortably so, and is sold at an obtainable price-point for him to freely create and donate such large quantities.
Don knows all too well the hardships that cancer can have on the couples and families that it touches, having lost his wife Jean to the disease nine years prior to being diagnosed himself.
"That's why I make the hats," he said modestly. "It's just my way of giving back."