Sewing For a Cause

This is my oldest daughter, Cora.

She is 13 years old and decided that she wanted to sew skirts for orphans in Liberia.

Why Liberia? We know a woman that grew up in Liberia, but had to flee her home because of much civil unrest. She fled to a small village and the people there kept her alive until she could finally make it to the U.S. As a thank you to this village, she started an orphanage. It is called “Faith Center” and has given 60 beautiful children a place to be loved, sheltered and protected. The “Faith Center” has helped these children enormously, but they still need so very much! Every day they walk 45 minutes to a nearby stream to get water. They only have enough money for one meal a day and until recently they didn’t even have bowls and spoons to eat with.

Cora and I were touched by this story and we wanted to help these children, especially the girls. We wanted to give each of them something beautiful, feminine and made especially for them. So we decided to make each of them a skirt.

We put out a call to friends and family for donations to help us purchase the material and lots of people pitched in to help out! A HUGE thank you and BIG HUGS to all those loved ones that donated.

After we gathered the money, Cora and I headed off to the fabric store.

We made 36 skirts and we wanted each one to be different. We felt like it was important that each girl would have a skirt that was uniquely hers. We ended up buying fabric at three different fabric stores, but we found our favorites at Hobby Lobby. Above is a picture of Cora at the cutting counter. Who knew it took so long to cut 27 different bolts?

Then began the sewing. Luckily for us, we had some helpers. The young women from our church spent one Wednesday evening helping us sew. Cora and I did the cutting and the prep work, then we had all the young women at different stations: ironing, sewing, pinning and cutting elastic. It was so crazy busy that I completely forgot to get pictures, but I did snap a couple at the end.

Thank you lovely ladies!

After our Wednesday night activity, we had 2 skirts complete and 34 part way done. Cora and I spent another 15 to 20 hours sewing skirts together, but we finally finished!

To sew the skirts we used the simple skirt tutorial

from “Dana Made It”. If you have never seen Dana’s blog, it is fabulous! It is full of simple, beautiful tutorials. She has quite a knack for explaining things clearly with lots of gorgeous pictures.

The skirt is quite simple and can be whipped up in a jiffy if you are not making 36 🙂