Hugs

This month, in between all the craziness, my family and I have taken up Gigi's challenge to spend more time focusing on the real reason for Christmas. One of the things we did this past week was to make some blankets for Project Linus and deliver them to the local Project Linus meeting on Saturday. This was a real family affair and Mike turned out to be an expert at tying up the fleece strips. We made the double fleece blankets that are tied all around the edges. You didn't really think that I could "sew" a blanket, did you?

Project Linus is an organization that collects blankets and whose mission is " to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children who are seriously ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need through the gifts of new, handmade blankets and afghans, lovingly created by volunteer “blanketeers.” The national chapter has distributed over 2 million blankets and the local Bibb County chapter has distributed over 12,000 blankets. Our local chapter also collects blankets in patriotic colors and distributes them to the children of soldiers who have been deployed and provides adult sized blankets for injured soldiers.

We went to the meeting with Gigi and the 3 W's because they also made a blanket. It was so sweet to walk into this room of adults where they were so happy to have us and gave the children the opportunity to share their blankets. Of course we were very proud of our blankets, but there were some really beautiful blankets there and several embroidered blankets that were like works of art. But these ladies exclaimed over our blankets and how pretty they were and the children got to draw names for the raffle and one lady gave them all a pocket calendar. We were there to do something for other people and ended up the stars of the meeting (a little wiggly and sometimes noisy, but stars nonetheless :).

If you have a chance try to check out Project Linus. It is a great organization and we left with a plan to make more blankets and to recruit our Bunko Babes as new "blanketeers" since they are always so willing to help out anybody in need. The people at Project Linus sign all their correspondence with "Hugs", because they think of each of their blankets as a hug for a child. It was a wonderful feeling to be able to make and deliver a "hug" and we all received hugs from the chapter leader as we left the meeting. We also got a book with ideas and directions for more blankets so I hope we'll be making more during the year. We made some simple blankets but left the meeting with a feeling of gratitude for all that we have and a promise to make blankets!

Hugs,