I got the inspiration for our End of the Year activity from this image I saw on Pinterest.
The holiday season is a great time to offer thanks for all that we have, but it's also a great time to serve. And that's just what we did.
We started out the night by having a "Thankful Dinner" which consisted of 3 yummy fall soups: Butternut Apple, Cauliflower, and Potato Bacon. We also served a bunch of different salads and some rolls. I decorated using Thanksgiving decor including my {Thankful Banner I made and posted about here} which I love so much!
We set up the round tables in the Relief Society room and used real tablecloths and the real dinnerware out of our church kitchen. We wanted this night to be special and using the real stuff just made it feel so much nicer!
Different sisters brought centerpieces with the Thanksgiving theme for each table .
And then we had several pies for dessert.
Each place setting had a napkin tied with a dried grain of wheat and a tag that said, "So Thankful for You."
So, the sisters came and ate and visited. We invited the Young Women in our ward to join us for this activity which was great!
And then we moved into the gym for our service project. I found this great idea on Pinterest from {this Little Dresses for Africa blogpost} to make pillowcase dresses for {Little Dresses for Africa} an organization that makes and sends these pillowcase dresses to little girls in Africa and other countries all over the world who have never had a dress. Thier mission is to give these little girls some self esteem. I loved the idea of making things for some fellow sisters in need, and I thought there would probably be many sisters in our ward who had extra fabric they could donate to make these dresses.
I was right! We had more fabric than we could use! Maybe we'll have to do it again sometime. The {Little Dresses for Africa website} has a lot of information on how to make the dresses and how to determine sizes and package them up, etc.
Here are the measurements we used for the pillowcases donated.
And here is the pattern for how to make these pillowcase dresses using just fabric donations. Most of our dresses were made out of fabric scraps.
Then, we just followed the instructions from this:
So with the fabric scraps we were pretty much just making a pillowcase first by sewing up the sides before we were able to follow the rest of the instructions.
So, we had a cutting station, where sisters determined what size the dresses could be accourding to the size of the fabric or pillowcase donated. Then we had an ironing station with tons of irons where the sisters prepared the pieces for sewing.
And then we had a sewing station where ladies who had brought sewing machines stitched away and mad as many dresses as we could! I called them my little sweatshop because they were working so hard.
A lot of the dresses ended up being really cute!
We strung them all up at the end just so we could see how many we had made.
I loved how colorful it was! So many fun fabrics made so many fun dresses!
It was kind of slow going at first as the sisters got the hang of how to make them, but I was so impressed with how many dresses we were all able to make! At the end my feet were killing me! But my heart was happy!
39 Little Dresses for Africa.
