Today's the Day!

It's hard to believe it's finally here! The group is meeting at my high school at ten thirty tonight, where we'll weigh our luggage and load up the bus. One of the teachers who goes to church with our leader is driving us down to Atlanta, where we'll take a flight (with a stop) to San Jose, Costa Rica! I think the travel is what I'm looking forward to least; in the end we'll be traveling for somewhere around twelve hours, including time changes, layovers, and drive time. And that's just to get to San Jose! From there we will travel to other cities in Costa Rica over our stay, including one of our leaders' hometown.

I haven't really packed yet, besides the stuff for the orphanage. I've laid a few things out and made my list, but nothing's in a duffel yet. We have to pack light, because in order to keep costs down, two people have to share a suitcase, and that suitcase can't exceed forty pounds.

We've all done so much work to prepare for this trip, and it's been a long time coming. It seems like just yesterday we were making our deposit! I'm excited to see our work pay off and be the hands and feet of Jesus for the people of Costa Rica!

Goodies!

Today I packed everything into the duffel! Everything isn't actually in the picture above; I ended up adding another blanket and made two more teddy bears to even the numbers out. I ended up with 18 blankets, 18 pillowcases, and 18 teddy bears. I am officially done making things! And it all fit in one duffel!

T-minus 3 days until we leave!

Teddy Bears are Done!

Finally, the bears are done!!

These were the hardest for me to make, because as I quickly discovered, sewing is not my forte. But, several hours and quite a bit of frustration later, they're all finished. 

I still have to make a smaller sample pillowcase to send to the Girl Scouts with my final paperwork, but other than that I am all done making things!! It feels so good not to have to make anything else. Now I can concentrate on getting ready for the trip!

Less than a week now!

Brochures

One more week until we are on our way to San Jose, Costa Rica! I'm going to attach pictures of the brochure I made on my project so that it is available for anyone interested in doing similar projects. All of the items are relatively simple to make and don't take that long!

Pillowcases are Done!

Today I knocked the rest of the pillowcases out of the way! Once my mom and I figured out the best way to paint them, it went pretty quickly. We did them all in a total of about three hours. Here's an example of the finished pillowcases!

All that's left to do is make a brochure to hand to people and sew the last four teddy bears. The group leaves a week from tomorrow! (Technically today, since we're leaving at about eleven at night on Monday, but whatever.)

Blankets Are Done!

Today I was free until later this evening, so I sat down and worked on blankets for most of the day. I had a lot of them cut already, and four that still had to be cut. I cut those and tied all of them, so as of today all of my blankets are finished! They're currently waiting in a giant trash bag to be packed into a duffel.

There's about seventeen total, I believe, and they're all child size, which is about forty inches by sixty inches. It feels so good to finally be done with a portion of this project! Here's what one of the final products looks like.

Our group leaves two weeks from today!

1/4 of the Way There!

Today I tied a few blankets for my project and reached a milestone! Upon writing down my time, I counted up my hours and saw that I have finished twenty of my (suggested) eighty hours! Only sixty more to go!