In 2017, Los Angeles artist Jayna Zweiman started Welcome Blanket as a response to the first Trump administration’s proposed border wall between Mexico and the United States.
Instead of a 2,000-mile concrete wall, Zweiman wanted to knit that length in skeins of yarn, creating blankets and accompanying notes to give to refugee and immigrant neighbors.
Thousands of handmade blankets have been distributed to new immigrant and refugee neighbors since 2017. Photo courtesy of Welcome Blanket/Instagram
With an onslaught of donors who wanted to contribute to the project, she quickly hit her goal of gathering 6,000 Welcome Blanket packages.
So, she upped the ante.
Now, the goal is to cover the circumference of the earth — 24,901 miles “that connect us all,” she writes — in welcome blankets.
It will take 36,521 hand-knit or quilted pieces to do this. So far, she has collected 8,000.
Jayna Zweiman. Photo courtesy of Welcome Blanket
“Taking part in Welcome Blanket is a tangible way to recognize and celebrate our global humanity and to uphold a foundational premise that immigration is vital for the continuing vibrancy of our society and growth of our nation,” Zweiman shares on the project’s website.
“My hope is for Welcome Blanket to become a new American tradition and for every refugee family to receive this symbolic and practical gesture.”
Crafters who take part in the project are instructed to make 40-inch by 40-inch lap blankets using their preferred method: Knitting, crocheting, sewing, or quilting.
Some projects are displayed in galleries or exhibitions before being distributed through local resettlement agencies, while others can be sent to a P.O. Box and are added to an on-call list for distribution.
Every blanket comes with a welcome note from its maker. Photo courtesy of Welcome Blanket/Instagram
Donors are also asked to log their blankets in an online form to keep track of that planet-sized goal.
They are also asked to write a welcome letter to whoever their recipient may be, which is tied carefully to the final blanket. Some crafters even stitch notes into their blankets, like quilt squares spelling out, “you belong here,” or hand-sewn tags that read, “welcome home.”
Zweiman is also a co-founder of Pussyhat Project, an international network of crafters and women’s rights supporters, who banded together to create pink “pussy hats” at the start of Trump’s first term. The project gained worldwide momentum and remains one of the largest crowd-sourced art advocacy projects in history.
One volunteer with a quilt she made for the project. Photo courtesy of Welcome Blanket/Facebook
Zweiman said her “innovations in craftivism have been rooted in design strategies to make spaces and systems for people to connect through craft.”
And it seems Welcome Blanket has become a much-needed extension of this work, especially as activists wield their knitting needles and crochet hooks in the fight against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As big as the project has gotten, it all still stems from Zweiman’s curious and compassionate notion: “Instead of keeping people out, what would it be like to think about how to welcome them in?”
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A version of this article was originally published in The 2026 Home Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image courtesy of Welcome Blanket/Instagram
