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I am also doing the Linus project. Our local office said I could mail them or deliver them to them since they are about 1 hour away. What do you mean that the project manager emailed the handsonnetwork confirming the completion of the project and then she stated website wouldn't allow her to do that? Has everything been confirmed for you yet? Thanks for your help!!
Were the blankets easy to make? I have 3 children and it was the only thing I could find that would allow my 7 year old to do. I think this is a great project.
We did the blankets last week. it was easy to do, but pretty time consuming for 5 people....
1 night to buy the fabric and wash it,
1 night to make sure all of the fabric is squared properly (VERY important if you want to make things easy on yourself once you start marking and cutting)...this actually took only about 2 hours for the 10 blankets, but it is a "night" for me after the kids were in bed.
2 afterschool/evenings with the family to work on these, and this doesn't include the time i took during the day to measure and cut many of the strips.
As the kids were suppose to do their own blankets, I spent much more time with them than I really needed to, as I let them measure some and practice cutting a bit with the rotary cutter (a new tool for us).
it was a FABULOUS experience for our family. the kids really got into this "hands on" project that was so fun for them to do (at least the first night...by the second night, they were a bit less enthusiastic about it, I must admit!). It gave us a chance to talk about community service and discuss the possibility of doing a family service project more often. We do "community service", but that generally consists of food drives, donating to goodwill, red cross drop-offs, talking about the importance of donating money, etc. The kids want to continue to make blankets for project Linus, once they each make their own blankets! I'd like to think that this is EXACTLY what HandsOn Network and Disney had hoped would happen with this newest incentive. (well, that, and that we'd use these "free" tickets and take atrip that we didn't plan on taking just to use them...which is what we are doing!)
here are a few things i learned from making our no-sew fleece blankets (directions from the Project Linus website):
1.) USE a ROTARY CUTTER...priceless!
2.) have a big space available to cut. it was much easier to lay out the fabric and cut it all at once, rather than using, say, half of the kitchen table and having to move and readjust the fabric repeatedly. i have a craft table that we put a piece of luan (sp?) wood over to use the rotary cutter on while i was trimming the edges of the blankets. i used a small cutting mat for cutting the fringe. this made things easy as it has the measurements on the mat. I pre-measured 2 inches up from the edge of the fabric and marked that with pins all the way across, then put the cutting mat under and used the mat's measurements to cut a slit every one inch, up to the pin...went pretty quick once I got a system.
3.) make sure your blankets edges are square (or your corners are perpendicular, or however you want to describe this) before you start cutting. if you don't have an easy way to do this at home, ask them at the fabric store if they can square up the edges for you.
4.) don't plan on this being a cheap project...even with fleece being 30% off (and 3 of our blankets used fleece from the clearance section), we spent $70.
Have fun!
Jennifer
