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In Garden City, Michigan, Dawn Lafferty and her devoted group of volunteers are doing what they can to offer comfort to parents who have lost their infants. Lafferty is the founder of Angels Above Baby Gowns, an organization that takes donated wedding dresses and uses them to make burial gowns for infants. “I just hate the thought that these ladies are losing their babies and they haven't even planned for the clothes that they're going to wear,” Lafferty says. “They should be shopping for cribs, not funeral arrangements.” Since she founded the group in May 2014, the volunteer seamstresses have made over 7,000 “angel gowns”, as well as blankets, hats, and headbands for grieving families.
Lafferty founded the organization after hearing about a similar group in Washington state; when she couldn’t find something like it in her area, she decided to start her own. “I love to sew and thought this would give me the opportunity to sew every day that I was able to,” she explains. Several friends immediately joined her, and they set to work. They set up wedding gown donation points throughout Michigan; volunteers collect the gowns and bring them to Lafferty’s home, where a makeshift studio is bursting at the seams. There, they cut and piece the gowns into baby clothes, often painfully tiny ones since the newborns are frequently too small for standard baby sizes.
Now, they’re hoping they can find donated storage space since they have already outgrown their work space. Even with these logistical challenges, Lafferty and her volunteers are eager to carry on with their work of providing “a gift from the heart for those who lost their children before ever coming home from the hospital.” The thousands of gowns they have made in the past year and a half have been donated to over forty hospitals.
As for the gowns impact on the families, while Lafferty rarely has direct contact with the grieving parent who receive them, there was one occasion that particularly stood out for her: "We had met a woman when we went to make our delivery at U of M. She had a little girl, and they decided there wasn't anything else that they could do. So she went home on hospice. Her husband, he overnight shipped us her wedding dress and we made the baby girl an angel gown."
You can learn more about Angels Above Baby Gowns on HuffPost at http://huff.to/1kBZeaR
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