Babies, Bears and Bags for Operation Christmas Child Filler Donations

Babies, Bears and Bags, Oh, My!  We continued to work on Baby Bundles this week to use up the babies we have on hand for Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes.  We also had several extra fleece bitty blankets that I considered sending as fillers just as blankets but decided to make them into little bags and tuck in a stuffed animal (see further explanation below).

Baby Bundles--Baby doll with flannel blanket, crocheted hat and a girl size hat to match

Unfortunately I, Cheryl, had a very slow week and only got the blankets for the babies cut out, tho Elizabeth got the crocheting done....hopefully I can finish them this week, but here they are as a Work In Progress.  We choose the colors for the baby's and girl's hats from the baby's outfits.

To be sure the items stay together at the processing center we slip ribbon thru the back of the hat on the baby's head, thru the girls hat and around the baby's waist.  Then we wrap her in the blanket and tie a ribbon tightly around the waist.

Fleece Bags with Stuffies

I have several extra fleece bitty blankets I cut out for my 2 to 4 year old girl OCC shoeboxes.  Elizabeth mentioned the other day how it would be nice to make bags out of soft blanket fabric so the child could cuddle it or carry in it.  So I took the fleece blankies and sewed them up into a drawstring bag and used satin ribbon for the tie (I thought the smooth texture would be different from the fleece and they may enjoy it).

I only made two so far, one the long way to hold a fish stuffie Elizabeth found at the Hospice Thrift Store and the other I sewed the short way to hold a Gund brand
mini-bear dressed up with cat ears.  We found these at a dollar type store--they were left over from Halloween.  They are the absolute SOFTEST stuffed animals I have ever seen.  I have several of them to use as fillers.  Check out Why We Include a Stuffed Animal in Each of Our Operation Christmas Child Shoeboxes.

Filler Tally (to date)

2 -- Hats
2 -- Baby Bundles (with girl hats)
2 -- Fleece bags with stuffies
____
6 --   Total

For more information on fillers for shoeboxes check out these earlier posts:  Donating Fillers for Operation Christmas Child Shoeboxes and A Day at the Operation Christmas Child Processing Center.

As a reminder, Operation Christmas Child encourages the packing of shoeboxes over the donation of fillers.  We pack as many shoeboxes as we can and use our extra crafting supplies and shopping deals to make fillers.