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She didn’t realize she’d gone viral until she returned home from the game. She opened her computer to email her professor to congratulate him again when she received a text message from her sister saying, “Hailey is this you?”

She spent the rest of her Saturday receiving messages from friends and family members about her newfound fame. She read comments from strangers online, which were — perhaps for the first time in internet history — almost all positive.

The project she was crocheting on camera was a small potholder, made for her lab coordinator, Woody. He’d mentioned wanting some dishrags, and Solomon figured she’d throw in a potholder or two to her gift. She doesn’t always carry projects with her, but if she knows she’ll have down time throughout the day, she will pack something like a dish rag, scarf or hat to work on.

Solomon’s grandmother, Janis, is the reason for all of this. Solomon remembers sitting next to her rocking chair while Janis knitted and crocheted “some of the most beautiful creations I’d ever seen,” Solomon said. When she was about 10 years old, she asked her grandma to teach her, and she’s been knitting and crocheting ever since. She’s come a long way since her first scarf, which she describes as a hideous orange thing that sort of turned into a triangle at one end. (Janis acted like it was the most incredible handmade item she’d ever seen, of course.)

Solomon’s love for knitting and crocheting has only grown in the decade or so since. During her sophomore year at Kansas, she teamed up with two friends, Karen Vazquez and Brittany Kracht, to found an organization called Warm the World. The group teaches anyone who wants to learn how to knit or crochet for free, and everything they make is donated to the homeless.

“I first envisioned this organization when I toured KU and Lawrence as a senior in high school,” said Solomon, who grew up about a three-hour drive south of Lawrence in Oswego. “I visited Massachusetts Street and was completely taken aback by the number of homeless people sleeping under the glittering windows. The small town I grew up in didn’t really have a homeless population, so seeing so many people going through such a hard time broke my heart, and I promised myself that, if I was able to get to go to KU, I would find a way to help these people.”

She knows that her hobbies are a little different from your typical college student’s. She didn’t go to the Snoop performance on Friday in part because she went to the Late Night in the Phog last year and “found it overstimulating.”

“I’m sure I sound like a grandma trapped in a young person’s body, but that’s only because it’s true,” Solomon said. “At this point in my life, I know who I am, I know what I like, and I know how I prefer to spend my time.

“I used to be incredibly self-conscious and even semi-ashamed of my atypical interests, but now I embrace them and I’m much better for it.”