Many hands make light work

As you will recall during the year I  along with other sewists have been busy making dresses, library bags, bibs and beanies.    Now the time has come for all those items plus many more to be packed up and shipped over to Sri Lanka in time for Christmas.    Today  myself along with 25 others spent the day making a start on this task.  

On arrival at the Church hall  I was assigned to removing the packaging from hundreds of tubes of toothpaste while others worked on removing the packaging from toothbrushes.

Once this task was completed we moved onto unpacking many hundreds of handtowels that had been donated by one of the major retailers.    Then a production line was set up to pack  a towel, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, comb plus a small toy or handkerchief depending on the child's age.

At some point in the morning I was moved into the stationery department.    Some of the thousands of pens, pencils, journals and exercise books all of which have been donated.

These items are all put into the library bags that were made throughout the year by myself and a few others.  We managed to sew just over 2,000 library bags between us.  Here are a few of them

They are now being laid out  production line style.  This batch happen to be some of those that I had made.

All waiting to be filled with pencil cases, pens, lead pencils, rubbers, pencil sharpeners, coloured pencils, letter and number stencils, exercise books and a puzzle book.  Doing "quality control" to make sure that all are given the same before bagging.

And just for a variety of jobs onto counting out and bagging up hundreds of colourful scrunchies that one of the sewists had made for the older girls.

Those 25 aprons that I had made from rescued tablecloths are waiting to be packed up along with a cake of soap, a pen and journal for some the orphanage workers.

And of course the dresses.    Here is a selection of them.    There were another 5 racks with just as many on them and some skirts for the older girls.

We made good progress with the packing as you can see by the amount of boxes on the stage.  Somewhere in those boxes are the beanies and bibs.

There are still another 5 more days of packing  to go with many "corporate groups" coming in during the next few days to complete the task.    I am told that there is "fierce competition" between the groups as to who can pack the most boxes.

It was an "eye opener" as to just how big an operation it is and even though it looked like chaos at first glance it was very well co-ordinated.    The organiser of this massive chore was awarded an Order of Australia last year for all her hard work over the last 15 years.

I am off to put my feet up and enjoy a cup of coffee.

Back soon and in the meantime
 

Happy sewing all