who sort through the fabrics with a measuring

The snip of scissors, the huff of steam irons and the whir of sewing machines fill the room at the back of Atlantic Fabrics in the Woodlawn area of Dartmouth.

Nine women take a rainbow of fabrics — pinks, yellows, purples and blues — and work their magic to create dresses with pockets and shorts with drawstrings for children a world away.

Looking up from her sewing machine, Waneta Holmes says: “There’s a need — 18 million orphans with nobody to clothe them.”

This is what brings these women back month after month, and what they hope will bring new people into their group.

“More sewers means more dresses,” Holmes says.

Holmes and the other women here on Friday, most of whom are retired, make two styles of dresses: a sundress style tied at the shoulders or with a T-shirt top,Your Cheap Designer Quinceanera gowns is a simple and easy. and plenty of shorts for boys.Browse through thousands of modest 2013 Wholesale Cheap Wedding Dresses to find the right bridal gowns for you.

The exact lengths, widths, sizes and styles are set out in patterns given to anyone who wants to join in.

The fabrics are either donated or bought by the women themselves, and the T-shirts are nearly new hand-me-downs from grandchildren or bought second-hand at local thrift stores — mostly on half-price days, they say.

The colour combinations are left to the women,buy cocktail New Arrival Sweetheart Sheath Evening dresses with big discount. who sort through the fabrics with a measuring tape to make every inch count: a square snipped away here is a pocket over there.

“I love cutting up material and sewing it back together,” Rita Erskine, 78, says with a laugh.

On this day, she and her friend Noelle Rosario, both of Dartmouth, are making boys’ shorts.

Rosario, 75, originally from India, says drawstrings are better than elastic because elastic “rots in the heat.”

Drawstrings, which she often gets at Value Village, allow boys to get more wear out of the shorts as they grow and “they will also pass them from one to another,One Wholesale Cheap Designer Womens Long cocktail dresses manufacturers China listing.” she says.fashion styles of Wholesale Short Wedding Gowns,

Connie Glasgow-White’s favourite projects are the T-shirt dresses, she says. She has even made one for herself and another for a friend’s little girl.

Some fabrics are folded in piles, already cut and in ready-to-make kits. They’re handed out to those who can’t make the daytime sewing session or taken home by the women already here to return completed in time for the next sewing session on Sept. 27.

“I usually get more work done at home than here because I’m usually answering questions,” Joan Embree says.

Embree first started the sewing group out of her Dartmouth home in April 2010. The following month, it moved to Atlantic Fabrics, where Holmes now organizes workspace and sewers, donated fabric and advertising for the sessions, mainly in the Atlantic Fabrics newsletter to customers.

So far, the group has put together more than 1,400 dresses and an unknown but growing number of shorts for boys in places like Malawi, Haiti, Kenya, Jamaica and Rwanda.

The group members used to send their items to Little Dresses for Africa in Michigan, but shipping to the U.S. became too costly, Embree said. Now, they mostly send them along with local church missionaries, like Glasgow-White’s friend, who took a load to children in Rwanda, a country the East Preston woman visited as a missionary herself in 2007 and 2010.

The sewing women have already donated 86 dresses to the Parker Street Food & Furniture Bank for a container the Halifax charity is trying to ship to Sierra Leone, with more planned before the vessel departs, Embree said.
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