VINEYARD — When Arda Molen was little, she always received her big sisters’ hand-me-down clothes made by their mother, a seamstress.

“Except that they were 12 and eight years older than me, and the dresses that they had looked really funny on me,” she recalled with a smile.

One school day, Molen wore another one of her older sister’s dresses to school and got teased by other kids.

“So I came home and decided that I would sew all my clothes from then on. And I did, from the age 12.”

While other girls got new dresses for Christmas, she received books filled with blank pages to design her own. Soon, she learned to design patterns. She eventually went to college to study sewing and later became an instructor.

But sewing wasn’t her only creative passion. Molen also danced, sang and painted — until one day four years ago, when she was severely injured in a four-car crash.

She could no longer do many of the things she loved. So to cope with the trauma, Molen decided to do what she still could — sew — to help other little girls receive something made just for them.

“I was hurt really bad. They had to cut me out of the car. Anyway, it left me so I couldn’t walk temporarily, I couldn’t walk at all. And so I had to sit. I decided instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, I would do something for someone who was worse off than I was,” she recalled.

Arda Molen, who has made thousands of dresses to donate to children in need, poses for a portrait at her home in Vineyard on Monday, Nov. 11, 2019. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News

Since then, Molen has made 5,000 dresses that have been donated to girls in developing countries worldwide. The last thousand or so have been taken by the organization World of Difference to Malawi, Africa.

“Arda is an amazing person. ... She has worked very, very diligently on this side, does all the hard work, and we get the blessings on the other side of the world to be able to deliver her love through those dresses to the needy children there,” said Richard P. Nielsen, co-founder and president of World of Difference, and founding president of Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions in Provo.

The organization, with many volunteers from the university, leads teams to Africa to help children, build schools and libraries, and drill wells in villages.

Nielsen said he’s raised five children, and “on Christmas morning, I see the joy and the happiness and the excitement in their eyes and in their faces.”

But he said nothing compares to the excitement of the orphan girls when they see the dresses made by Molen.

“These girls don’t have, they’re in orphanages, so they don’t have parents. They don’t have access to clothing or anything that we take so for granted here. And so the clothes they’re wearing are the clothes they’ve been wearing for the last year, will probably be the clothes they’re wearing for the next year,” Nielsen explained.

“For these girls to be able to receive a dress like that, that is new, the first question that not only comes out of their mouth but is expressed in their eyes is, ‘Is this my dress? Is this mine?’ And it’s like, ‘Yes, this is yours.’

Children wear dresses made and donated by Arda Molen. | Courtesy photo

“The tears, and the excitement and the disbelief. I mean, they just hold that dress like it’s a brand new baby.”

Molen says hearing of the girls’ reactions is what keeps her sewing. She has severely damaged her hand with all the thousands of hours of sewing and has undergone surgery. She’s also gone through multiple sewing machines.

However, “I can still sew. I guide it through the sewing machine even with this on,” she said of the cast on her arm. “In fact, the day after surgery, my grandson came to see me and I was in here sewing the day after surgery, and I said, ‘Don’t tell your mother.’”

He did tell his mom, and they threatened to take her sewing machine away, she recalled.

“But that’s how much I like to sew for these little girls.”

It takes about two hours to make one of the dresses, meaning Molen has spent about 10,000 hours making them. To put that into perspective, someone working a 40-hour week works 2,080 hours in a year.

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Now, with her injury, she can “only do a half-hour at a time, three times a day,” she says. Friends and family members now help her by pinning the shirt to the skirt.

And any time she sees any cute T-shirts or fabrics for the skirts in the store, she buys them all. Photo books of her dresses — and girls receiving them — show colorful fabrics, Disney themes and smiling faces.

For more information about Molen’s dresses and how you can help, visit the website her granddaughter created for her, humanitariansewing.org.

For more information about World of Difference and volunteer opportunities, visit makeaworldofdifference.org.

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