Making Joey Pouches

It's funny how word travels and if people hear about ways to help in disasters they are quick to pitch in...even, (or perhaps especially) if it's to help animals who are refugees from fires. We don't have kangaroos or koalas here, but we know about fires and this group came together pretty quickly. I mentioned to my friend and fellow knitter Fran (holding up a completed pouch) that she might be interested in knitting some, and she said that she had already joined up with a couple of friends two wanted to sew some, so I joined them today.

We were all well qualified in the construction aspects of the project. Lisa (looking on) does apparel design and construction and has an entire workshop set up in her house with everything we needed.  Lisa had organized everything beautifully with fabrics laid out and patterns ready and labeled.

Organization of ourselves was another matter. We sort of got an assembly line going with cutters, pressers and sewers, but while all of us are creative, we definitely have different strengths, none of which stretched to  organized three different sizes of pouches each with two extra liners.

We all worked diligently for a couple of hours, adjourned for lunch, and slowly realized when we returned to the task that nobody was paying attention to how many of each item had been made. We needed a left brained engineer to organizing things, but the task sort of fell to me, which I did by making piles and labeling them. Once that was done, we realized that we only had one completed medium pouch complete with its two liners.

It was turning out that this project was going to take a lot more time than we thought, so we are planning to get together again next week. I think it will go much more quickly just because organizing ourselves and our project more efficiently won't be necessary since we worked most of that out today. Organizing all the moving parts of any enterprise has never been my forté . I suspect that we have all developed our own way of completing a challenge individually,  but putting four people who don't know each other well, was a little like doing a psych experiment.* I think in our group this morning none of us has the mind of an engineer...even though a couple of us live with one.

It was a nice group of very interesting women. Everybody had been thinking about the question of postage and I am pleased to report that we all agreed to split the cost of mailing the completed pouches to Walking Wombat to give to her friend with an animal refuge. We're hoping to have a decent number to mail to you next week, WW.

* I participated in a psych experiment when I was in college where they put four people around a round table with partitions in the middle so we couldn't see each other; we could only pass notes through a little hole in the partition to the person on our right. Then we were given a problem to solve. I don't remember what the problem was and I'm not sure we were ever told if  or how we solved it....