Craft Hope for the Earth

We hosted a "cutting party" today and invited several of our friends from school to join us. Our school requires the kids to do at least one service project during the summer (as well as class projects during the year). I thought Craft Hope's current project, making wash rags that will be donated to several different organizations that are aiding in animal rescue and relief from the oil spill would be a timely project for the kids.

We had ten kids total and everyone brought old t-shirts, towels, sheets and fabric to cut. Many of the Mom's were happy to have an outlet for all the cast-offs that they'd been saving at home. I cut cardboard templates to the requested sizes so that the kids could trace them and then cut out the rags. When we were done cutting, the kids did a little math, sorting the rags into sets of ten.

Sharp scissors made for much easier work, we found, but regardless of the scissors, they kids had a great time working on this. In the end we had 360 rags cut with some families planning to go home and make more. We'll be sending four boxes out this week!

There were more piles on the other table, but we dared not mess up our sorted piles. We're so glad we were able to get a group together (on very short notice - my bad). When the work was done, the kids celebrated with ice cream cones. Honestly, my girls were so excited about this, you would have thought it was their birthday. Something to keep in mind when the birthday's do roll around!