Ronald McDonald House Service Project

Tonight's activity comes from here, a great cause. We wanted to make cards and fringed fleece blankets to donate.

Here's the rundown. (I was so mad when I realized I didn't have my camera! Pictures would have been so nice!)

Preparation:

For the blankets: Wal-Mart just happened to have a sale on solid color fleece so we grabbed just over a yard of both pink and blue and were able to get 2 blankets out of each yard. Sure, they aren't very big, but they are just big enough to comfort a child. The blankets are so easy to make, but just in cause you aren't sure how it's done, check this out.

For the cards: My partner gets all the credit for this! She worked so hard to create a good system that wouldn't result in mass chaos and a huge mess. What she came up with worked great! Using a circuit cutter she cut out tons of different sayings (everything from "thinking of you" to "get well soon" to "love") and shapes (everything from monkeys and giraffes to hearts and stars.) Then she labeled sandwich baggies according to what was inside, i.e. animals, planes, flowers, etc.

Set-up: We needed more room than normal for this activity so we used the Primary Room. We set up 3 round tables and 1 long one. The round tables were for the girls and the long table had all of the paper and cutouts on it. We laid out all of the baggies on one end (there must have been at least 30!) and the paper on the other. Since we had the perfect size scraps lefts over from the journals we gave them for this activity, pretty much everything was pre-cut and just the right size for cards.

Once all of the girls arrived we talked about what the Ronald McDonald house is and how it blesses families. Then we explained what we would be doing and where the cards and blankets would be going.

The girls came to the table and chose 1 paper at a time and a few coordinating cut outs. They were able to make as many cards as they pleased and once finished sat on the floor and worked on tying the blankets with the other girls that had finished.

It went so smoothly! I would be lying if I said I wasn't surprised at how cute the cards came out! At the end of the night we had 38 cards, 4 blankets and 18 very happy girls.