99-Year-Old Superstar Seamstress: DIY Person of the Week
Lillian Weber and some of her creations. (Photo: Little Dresses for Africa)
Think you've been sewing a long time? Well, Lillian Weber probably has you beat. The great-grandmother from Bettendorf, Iowa, first learned the craft a whopping 91 years ago, when she was just 8 years old. Today, at age 99, Weber doesn't just pick up a needle and thread once in a while. She makes a dress every single day – dresses that eventually find their way to kids in need halfway around the world.
"I feel like I've just been so blessed to be able to help somebody," she tells Yahoo DIY. "It helps me mentally to know I'm helping these little girls."
The exact same dresses Lillian held in the above photo on four girls in Malawi.(Photo: Little Dresses for Africa)
For the last eight years, Weber has been quietly sewing the tiny dresses by hand and adding them to a batch made by other local senior citizens for Little Dresses for Africa, a Christian non-profit that delivers the frocks to little girls in African nations, often via missions. After a local news station ran a story on Weber in August, her celebrity status snowballed as she began to get national media coverage.
"I didn't even know about her until then. She never put her name on her dresses. She was just sewing and sending them through," says Rachel O'Neill, who founded Little Dresses for Africa in 2008. "Her dresses are all really unique in their own way, with a little embroidery or a pocket or something special. They're always perfect. She's very exact. You'd never know they're made by a woman of her age."
O'Neill distributed Weber's dresses, along with dresses made by other volunteers, during a mission to Malawi in September. (Photo: Little Dresses for Africa)
Weber says she especially takes pride in adding that little something she adds to each dress to ensure that each piece is different. That newfound fame, however, hasn't fazed her. "I appreciate it, but it doesn't matter," she says. "I'm 99 and I'm doing pretty well and I'm content."
While family, friends, and neighbors have been providing her with material for years, perfect strangers are now pitching in. Weber gets packages from as far away as Hawaii from those who want to make sure she has everything she needs to keep making those dresses. And she's also helped funnel the generosity of others into Little Dresses for Africa's much-needed Lillian Weber Shipping Fund.
"Our biggest challenge is shipping. A lot of people like to sew but we also need to ship what they sew. Our job isn't complete until we get the dresses on the backs of the children," says O'Neill, whose organization has delivered a staggering 3 million dresses so far with the help of seamstresses from all 50 states and 30 other countries.
That number will keep going up if Weber has her way. She hopes to make her 1000th dress for the charity by the time she turns 100 next May. And though she says she could make three dress a day, there are other things she wants to do with her time too. (This week, it was making a batch of homemade apple sauce from a pile of fresh apples.) As for whether these kinds of projects help keep her mind sharp, "I think so," says Weber. "I feel I'm going to live forever. I'm going to make a lot of dresses yet. I'm not giving up."
You can contribute to Little Dresses for Africa here.
