Saturday for the regular sewing group meeting, we didn't have a program speaker because our charity sewing organizer wanted everyone to bring machines in to sew together on a new project. Board members including myself were all worried that attendance would be down by quite a lot, but it turned out ok. Not as many as usual each month, but a respectable number.
I had really talked up the project to the group by posting on FB and sending out extra email reminders. A fuzzy printout of the pattern was all that was shown at the board meeting Thursday afternoon, but it had enough info to identify its source. I found the pattern and a tutorial online and sent out messages so people could see it ahead of the meeting.
I think I ended up doing more publicity than the organizer did, but she did her part by asking the organization that requested us to sew to give us pre-cut kits. What a luxury, to not only have the fabric available but also to have it cut to size and ready to sew. (More or less -- of course we ran into kits with missing pieces and pieces cut the wrong size.)
The project was drawstring backpacks using the instructions from the Lutheran World Relief organization for their school kits. In our case, a local Catholic Church will be shipping the empty bags to parishes in Haiti for children to carry to school. It's the same group for which we sewed school uniforms before.
Here is a link to the instruction sheet we used:
http://tinyurl.com/lb4m2rvI also found a tutorial:
http://windsweptlady.blogspot.com/2012/ ... elief.htmlhttp://tinyurl.com/kspjdb2Another luxury: someone else will be dealing with the drawstrings at a later date. All we had to do was sew the basic bags. We were given 100 kits and the group yesterday managed to complete 51 bags.