Caramon, the Million Pillowcase kid, is working hard to collect as many pillowcases as he can to give to children in the hospital. This is his Eagle Scout project and one dear to his heart because he received his own pillowcase while undergoing cancer treatment at age 5. He is now 8.5 years cancer-free!
We will have photos and a summary for you later, we're a little swamped over the next week. Stay tuned!
However, the skinny - we used our regularly scheduled youth activity at Church to let Caramon work on his Eagle Project. Leaders and teenagers alike took up stations and we left with lots of finished pillowcases, pinned pillowcases, and stuffed pillowcases (stuffed with goodies).
Expect more details later! However, I did update our pillowcase count!
--Lady Ozma and Caramon, The Million Pillowcase Kid
The awesomeness kid of the day is our buddy J. He offered to let us invade his 11th birthday party and show the kids how to make pillowcases. He and his mom picked out some of the coolest fabrics. We had some of the coolest kids show up and we got a lot of good stuff accomplished!
One of the neighbours came over with ten pillowcases she made before the party. That was really cool. She also helped a little and plans to make more pillowcases. To our friends up north, thanks for working so hard on this project! Your support? Totally rocks! And gives us hope!
Joram, Caramon the Million Pillowcase Kid's brother, used his mad dog sewing skills to help us teach the other children and prepare the "hot dogs" for making. Mmmm hot dogs.
It was super crazy and super wild and SUPER FUN!
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get how to photos. So no tutorial yet. We'll continue to work on this. I promise.
Now, are you ready for some photos? Yeah? Well here goes:
Yup, it was super fun! Once again, THANK YOU!
Are you interested in hosting a Million Pillowcase Sew-A-Thon? Ask us what you need and if we can come!
We have to look at the calendar at our local church building to see when during the crazy holiday season we can host a sew-a-thon here in our town. I hope we can do something. My table is but only so big. We'll make it work if we need to!
--Lady Ozma and the Caramon, Million Pillowcase Kid
We are here to report the first sew-a-thon went very well. If you look right, you can see we've updated our collected pillowcase numbers! Huzzah for pillowcases!
We will blog more about the sew-a-thon after we've all recovered a little bit. But we want to give a great big:
THANK YOU SO MUCH
to our big suporter that used his ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY PARTY as a sew-a-thon for Caramon, the Million Pillowcase Kid! That's the AWESOME.
Oh and a great big:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
as well.
That said, we also want to feature a kid, who like Caramon, has a childhood that is filled with many doctors appointments and worries. We just saw this on Twitter and wanted to share it with you. If anyone is in the greater Vegas area and looking for some service opportunities... here you go. Check out the Matthew Blanchard Foundation now.
We look forward to updating - WITH PICTURES - soon!
Special Credit to: Lady O (Mom that helps me type) Dad (For helping me figure out the PDF Grandma (For driving me to my last appointment) My Bishop (for signing paperwork three times) Every Scout Leader I've ever had or will have Everyone else supporting the project.
So you want to make your own pillowcase? There's about eleventy hundred tutorials on the web. However, we can work towards making one if you need us to... after all guess what?
Our FIRST sew-a-thon is on Saturday!!!!!!
That's right! We want to give a great big shout out to our friend that wanted to do this as his BIRTHDAY PARTY. What a great kid! We shall bring you footage from this event sometime next week hopefully.
In other news, the paperwork has made it through everyone but the last person. Caramon, the Million Pillowcase Kid, set up an appointment to do that final step tomorrow night. Huzzah for being "official". Good timing with that sew-a-thon planned!
What do we need to make a pillowcase?
Well basically you just need some fabric and thread, but if you want to know what you need to make the cute pillowcases we've already shown you? Here's a supply list - this is the "hot dog" method which gives you lovely piping and everything:
27 inches by Width of Fabric for body of pillowcase (this is roughly 3/4ths of a yard)
10 inches by Width of Fabric for trim (roughly 1/3 of a yard, which is really 12 inches)
1 1/2 - 2 inches by Width of Fabric for piping (I recommend 1/8th a yard, it's a little wider, but easier to work with)
Here's the directions without any nifty pictures for a tutorial. Please, comment if you would like a better tutorial. We can work on a video or pictures. We can try to work on this at the sew-a-thon on Saturday!
Trim all pieces to the width of the shortest fabric. You are hoping to have it measure around 20-21 inches when folded! (This is important. Everything will just sew together faster if you go ahead and match your fabric widths! Trust me!)
Fold piping in half lengthwise and iron.
Stitch the piping to the body using 1/4 inch seam allowance.
Roll the body of the case up jelly roll (swiss cake roll, yum!) fashion, from the raw edges to the edge with the piping. Pin in several places through all the layers just to hold it.
Lay the trim face up on the table. Place the pillowcase body on top, matching the raw edge to your edge with the piping.
Fold your trim body edge up and around and pin. (This is what makes your hot dog! Your trim is the "bun", your body is the "hot dog" and your piping is like the "ketchup". Can you see it? Great!)
Stitch all the layers together. Don't forget to backstitch the ends!
Now you have a tube. You gently push the insides through one end. This is kind of fun because there's a bit of a "pop" as you reach a breaking point and then poof, everything just comes out easy as anything.
Iron everything flat. Feel free to topstitch if you feel the need, or add a decorative stitch. Or not. It's all the same.
With WRONG sides together, stitch along the side opening using a scant 1/4 inch seam. Iron to one side, then turn inside out and iron right at the seam line.
With RIGHT sides together, stitch a 3/8ths seam, encasing the previous seam. (This is a known as a French Seam and means you have no raw edges/exposed seams! Nice touch! Now you have fancy schmancy pillowcase in the making!)
Repeat steps 10-11 for the bottom seam.
Iron, take a picture, upload to the internet, and share with us... because... YOU ARE DONE!
Seriously, it is that easy.
I did find this tutorial which seems OK. Has loads of pictures.
Caramon is avidly collecting pillowcases, fabric, and items. If you are interested in helping out, please let us know. Our hope is to work hard this month and the start of December. We will log the pillowcases made at our local quilt store for the Million Pillowcase Challenge.
We already have 16 pillowcases we received in the mail. I look forward to updating that number this weekend!
We've had some great response to the Million Pillowcase Eagle Project idea. GREAT response! People are buzzing and that excites us all and is totally carrying us while we deal with the paperwork aspect of things.
So there we were on Monday, doing some schoolwork when the doorbell rang. Packages!
That's right! Caramon has two of the coolest Aunts ever! (In case anyone is wondering, Caramon thinks that all his Aunts top the cool chart and this just proved it.) We decided that his next vlog entry should be him opening the presents. His guest aide? Tenderfoot brother, Joram!
Check the two of them out as they enjoy opening the packages! And check out the loot!
I know we blew through three boxes, but we knew we were limited for time. You should see all of this stuff. It was awesome. After the video we enjoyed really looking at stuff.
Caramon loved the sixteen pillowcases. Some of these were super cute and some of these were awesomely cute and some of these were amazingly cute. So really? Sixteen super cute pillowcases! Some are flannel and way soft. There's camo pillowcases, sparkly pink pillowcases, pillowcases for littles, pillowcases for bigs. It's a great way to start off the pillowcase collection! Thank you so much to Caramon's amazing Aunts for their generosity and hard work! You can see 16 pillowcases stacked up right here. Nice, right? What else was in the box? What WASN'T in the box? Let's just say that *someone* had a little bit of fun at the dollar store! Holy cow. We couldn't believe everything crammed into those boxes!
In fact it took us several tries to get everything BACK into the boxes. Super cool Aunts? We are impressed with your packing skills!
Some of the contents in the boxes:
folders
crayons
colored pencils
pads with paper games like tic-tac-toe, dots, and hangman
a bazillion silly bandz
army men
lego packets
crazy straws
notebooks
coloring books
activity books
puzzles
door hangers
cars
pencil sharpeners
pencils
cards
I'm probably missing something. Or a bunch of somethings. All I know, this is going to be great!
--Lady Ozma and Caramon, the Million Pillowcase Kid
