Favorite Dress

Through most of the '90's this was my favorite dress.  It doesn't look like much in the photo and I don't think I have a photo of myself wearing it.  Argh!  But I wore it for some good times and bad and it has a lot of memories.  When cleaning up the upstairs a couple weeks ago, I pulled a couple items from my closet that I'd been keeping entirely for sentimental reasons.  Since I wanted more room for scrapbooking, the memories associated with this dress seemed like an obvious thing to capture.  The dress still technically fits but it looks miles too big -only because styles have changed.  It is also a little young looking for me now so I'm passing it along.

Churning up the memories of this dress was both pleasant and painful, but mostly rewarding.  Here's the journaling:

When this dress hangs on the racks at Goodwill, no one else will know how much it meant to the original owner. No one will know how often it was worn over more than a dozen years. The fabric is still mostly in great shape, but it will just look a little large for its marked size, probably a little too out of style.



I wore the dress to church and to work. It went dressed up or dressed casual. I always felt pretty, even cute when I wore it. “Wash it, wear it, love it” could have been the maker’s catch phrase. Oddly I don’t remember where I bought it or even if I bought it myself. I could go in my closet now and tell you where almost every item of clothing came from but for some reason, not this favorite navy one. It was new to me in 1993 – that I remember because I wore it on a special trip.


A prospective buyer won’t know how I felt sitting on a Dallas-bound flight late one evening off to see my lover and best friend who later became my husband. I remember the anticipation at reuniting after weeks of his working away from home. We only had a few days and I wanted to make a good impression in my pretty new dress, wearing cute white slingbacks that pinched my toes but looked so perfect with the dress. Lenny was waiting for me at the gate in a lavender silk shirt and black jeans holding apricot roses. His smile lit up my heart for the rest of the weekend.


I have no photos of that weekend but I remember what a wonderful, relaxed time we had. He had cleaned his ‘apartment’ – a by the week rental in a complex used mostly by working men. The only other women I saw on the place was the custodian. Everyone made fun of Lenny for staying there. I remember him reading me a poem when we first got there. We went to his and my favorite Dallas/Ft. Worth area restaurants, we visited the amusement parks, ‘earned’ a gift at an arcade, we talked, we loved each other for three days and then I had to come home.


I continued to wear the dress for work. If the buyer at Goodwill looks carefully, they may see the tiny hole on the left front. I had this dress on for a teaching day in 2000 when I ran errands at lunch and had a serious accident. The impact of the crash ripped my name tag off the dress. We later found the plastic tag in the back of the totaled van amid thousands of pieces of glass. Luckily, I wore the dress the rest of the day and several more times.


The last time I put the dress on was for the funeral of a dear woman a couple of years ago. My favorite summer dress had gotten so out of style I shrugged it off and wore something else that 4th of July weekend when a church full of mourners paid tribute to a lady who touched many hearts. She wouldn’t have minded what I wore.


Closets get full and space needs to be re-purposed so eventually even special clothes need must find a new home. I’ll always remember my favorite dress and the adventures, love and luck experienced while wearing it.

I did keep a little more of the dress than the memories.  It had a large facing in the inside back so I trimmed off the edge and made a flower decoration.  I should probably just throw the dress away now but it really is still wearable and I just can't bear to put it in the trash.

Thanks for sharing a little of your day with me!

Ingredients:  DSP:  Bella Bleu by SU!
Font:  Sari's Flower from dafont for the Cricut cut border
Cardstock:  Hobby Lobby