Our Christmas Project Preparations

Our friends, Ken and Chrys Meadows have always been service minded like we have and love to do special service to those in need at Christmas time.  So we made a plan to find fleece to make double sided baby blankets since few homes have heating in them.  We thought perhaps we could locate an orphanage to give them to.  We were unsuccessful at finding cute fleece in Xela so expanded our search to San Francisco Alto which is a mountain town whose specialty is fabric or anything to do with sewing.  Every shop was filled with fabric or notions for sewing.  Look at the city plaza below with fabric just laid out everywhere in piles. 

We finally found the perfect fabric and at a good bargain too which was even better when we bought a large quantity.  We purchased enough to make

48 baby blankets!

Then came cutting the edges off evenly and making the back exactly the same size as the front.

Because our backing fabric was not the same width as the blanket fronts we had to sew some of the backs down the middle.  It was fun to work together with all the temple missionaries.

On Monday, Dec. 15, we all met in our common area and worked on tying the blankets on the edges to secure the backs to the fronts.  Here is Brannick and Ernie Maes working on one together.

We inherited 200 larger blankets from a boy scout project, ready to give to needy families.  President Galvez learned of a high mountain branch that is very poor and would not have any Christmas.  So we decided to change our project to aim towards doing what we could for them and incorporating all our blankets.

This is Hermana Galvez showing off some of the larger blankets we found.  All we had to do was wash and refresh them.  We also bought basic food staples and put them into individual family boxes to give them out.

Here is President Galvez and two of our temple missionary men showing off proudly the blanket they worked on together.

We still had a few to cut the fringe on so they could be tied together.  So great to have us all working together on a service project.  Great thing for ancianos (ancient ones) to do!

And here we all are, proudly showing off all our united work.  We finished 45 blankets that night and the last three a few days later.

I thought this was a nice shot with the blankets piled in the Meadows apartment with the lighted temple showing in the background.  In the next post we will share the actual delivery experience, which was just marvelous!