I’m really happy to have finally completed this dress. I started it almost a year ago! It was almost a wadder a couple of times…in fact, I wadded it up last night and chucked it dramatically in the garbage can when the zipper broke. (The same zipper that I had already sewn in and ripped out and sewn in again a second time.) Bless my darling husband, he fished it out of the trash and repaired the broken zipper for me. He knows just how to handle my sewing drama queen outbursts. He’s a keeper.

Anyway, thanks to Project Sewn’s Going Global challenge this week for giving me a good excuse to ‘unwad’ this and get it done. The dress pattern is Burda’s “Fatina” #6051 , a simple design that shows off this amazing batik fabric I purchased last year in Ghana to its best advantage. The market in the city of Ho in Volta Region has a bunch of stalls that sell gorgeous Ghanaian batik cloth in a riot of colours.

So how come I was lucky enough to have gone to Ghana, you ask? (Or maybe you didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway!) I was there on my second volunteering holiday with Disaster Volunteers of Ghana. The first time I went, in 2011, I helped raise money for and construct a new school house for the village of Biakpa. Here’s a picture of the finished 3-room school house, along with some of the kids who use it:

I wrote more about my experience with the Biakpa school on the Going Going Ghana blog…that’s the organization my friends and I run to help fund projects in Ghana.

The second time I went to Ghana, in 2013, I brought some of my university students along with me because I knew that spending 2 weeks volunteering in a rural village would change their lives like it had for me. So off we went to the village of Adaklu Dawanu, this time to build a school and a community radio station. But before we went, we spent months and lots of energy raising money to fund the projects. My sister and I turned my dining room table into what we called our “jewelry sweat shop”… we created lots of beaded necklaces and bracelets and my wonderful friends and even strangers bought them to show their support. You can view some of the pieces that sold in this Facebook album.  I was delighted to tally up that just with jewelry sales alone, I turned a $500 investment in materials into a $2000 donation to DIVOG. All told, our group raised over $25,000. Amazing.

Here are some pics from my second trip to Ghana last year.

If you’re interested to know more about volunteering in Ghana, you can check out Going Going Ghana.com, DIVOG.org,  or feel free to get in touch with me! I’d be delighted to tell you more!