On the flight home from Alaska after Christmas, I started thinking about the obscene amount of flannel that I had and really feeling convicted that I was hoarding it.  I didn’t actually need all that flannel so why did I feel compelled to buy/keep it?  I had also just found out that YoungLives (a ministry of YoungLife for teen moms) was just starting up in Baltimore and that our church was involved.  The YoungLives blanket project was born!

First I collected all the flannel I had and paired it up.  It turns out that I had enough flannel to make 23 blankets.  That’s 46 yards.  Crazy.  (That’s the siren call of Black Friday at Joann’s for you.)  It took me awhile just to iron, true up, and cut all the pieces.  I saved out five blankets worth for all the babies coming up in my life over the next few months.

I realized that Iwould be sewing forever if I tried to make them all.  So I recruited a few friends who also love to sew, Betsy, Anne, and Steph and they came over for sewing and fun.  Between what they sewed that night and took home with them, they sewed 9 blankets!

Here are the blankets that I sewed.  I had fun putting together the smaller pieces of flannel in order to make more blankets – a bit like mini-quilts.  It turned out to be a good thing that I did this; otherwise, we would have had hardly any blankets for boys!

(WordPress won’t let me exclude pictures in a post from the slide show.  So you’ll see the other pictures in the post at the end of this.)

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And here are all 18 blankets waiting for their new homes!

I hope the moms and babies will be blessed by having a nice warm blanket.  We use our homemade blankets all the time and I don’t know what we’d do without them.   I also feel remarkably lighter not having all that flannel hanging over my head.  A win-win for everyone!