My sister, in North Carolina, was trying to think of a way to get me back into sewing after my long illness. She shared the website for Little Dresses for Africa with me, but I never looked into it. (http://www.littledressesforafrica.org/blog/)
In December 2013, I spent three weeks with her. During that time we talked more seriously about this wonderful project. (Among other things)
When I arrived home I started an "Anti-Cabin Get Together" get together, and invited my friends to come to make these darling dresses with me. It really wasn't until early spring of 2014 when we were able to start getting together on a regular basis. It ended up being four of us meeting weekly to make dresses. We are NOT a church-affiliated group. We are NOT a formal organization. We are simply a team of friends who want to help little girls in need. We receive gifts of pillowcases, accessories and even cash to help pay for materials and shipping. When we purchase items we almost always have coupons or buy on sale. One of our greatest benefactors has been Hope Lutheran Church in Jordan, MN. (http://hope-jordan.org/home-2/)
We were looking for ways to ship the dresses as inexpensively as we can. We started with USPS flat-rate boxes, using the "Space Bags" (the box is 12" x 12" x 6") so we could get as many dresses as possible into each box. Then we found it was cheaper to ship via Fed Ex. I had been talking to everyone I could think to find a way to get dresses to girls in need when one day I mentioned it to a Physician’s Assistant who was shadowing my doctor. She told me we was going with Hope Without Borders (http://hwb-intl.org/), to Kenya that summer and she would check to see if they could take some. The summer of 2016, they took dresses with them and sent back three pictures and a video. What an amazing blessing -- one of our greatest desires was to actually see our dresses on little girls. We plan to send more dresses to them for future trips. At this point, we changed our name to Little Dresses for the World as dresses would no longer be going only to Africa. In November of 2016 we were introduced to Freshwater Community Church of Waconia/St. Boni (http://freshwaterchurch.org/) and took dresses to Haiti on their mission trip.
