The Wedding Dress. #sol23

Me and my first best friend, Florence Kneedler Wilkerson, circe 1981 when she was 80 and I was 22.

March 9, 2023

Recently I was talking to my son’s fiance about her potential wedding dress.  It made me think about the story of my own wedding dress.  

Today, forty-five or so years later,  I can’t remember where the idea originated.  I’m sure it was something like this.  

My mom or my grandmother had a craft magazine or book.  They owned it or they checked it out from the library, probably for a craft they thought or they actually made.  Both of them were always sewing, knitting, or crocheting something.  Handwork, they called it.  Their hands were always busy.  Cooking, cleaning, reading, or doing handwork.  

So one day, before I met my husband or perhaps even considered getting married, my precious grandmother decided to make me a wedding dress.  Not your typical wedding dress bought in a fancy dress shop.  Not your homespun wedding dress sewed by the expert hands of my grandmother or my mother.  My grandmother decided to crochet my wedding dress from ribbon. 

Contrary to popular belief,  crochet and knitting are not dead arts.  They are thriving, creative, lively pastimes.  It’s funny now.  My mom did not crochet and my grandmother did not knit.  In my remembered narrative they each taught me their particular crafts.  Truthfully,  I probably went to some class to learn or I used one of the many, many books that were in my growing up house about crocheting and knitting.  I, too, can knit and crochet.  My knitting skills far outweigh my crochet skills.  

So sometime in the late ‘70’s , most likely while I was away at college and she was alone much of the time, my grandmother decided to crochet a wedding dress… with a jacket.  

If you know anything about crochet, you might know that the materials you use and the pattern really affects the ease of the project.  Ribbon wasn’t designed for crochet, being stiff where yarn isn’t and slippery and wide.  As with many other crafts, she was undaunted.  In my memory, she was undaunted by most things.  I can hear her say, “ You just set your mind to it.” 

So for the better part of a year, she crocheted a dress… in one piece.  It got heavier and heavier.  Harder to move and to hold, but she persevered.  She kept a pillowcase or maybe a cotton bag that she had sewn together and through that year, the dress grew from hem up to shoulders.  In a stroke of luck in those days of my very early 20’s,  I was quite tiny, so the dress was slightly smaller than it might have been. 

When it was finally completed,  it was one of a kind and perfectly fitted to me.  

When I did decide to marry,  I slipped on that simple looking, but technically complex dress. It had been waiting in the closet of the room I never lived in, having left for college and never returning.  It wasn’t the last gift my grandmother gave me, but it was a goodbye.  A goodbye to all those moments from the time I was 3 or 4 until that day at 22, when I would never live with her again.  I wouldn’t travel to Oklahoma for the summer.  I wouldn’t have all the moments steeped in the large, far-extended family I would never see again.  All those 2nd and 3rd cousins,  all that family history would live just in my memory after that day.  

At home in that dress crocheted with memories,  I hugged her neck, tears stinging my eyes.  She did what she always did.  She returned my squeeze with a deeper hug and some gentle back pats.  She smelled of roses and certainty.  

That dress lives in my attic.  I don’t have any daughters and it’s small size and old-fashioned crafting precludes that I will be the only person ever to wear it.  When someone finds it years from now, I will be a curious site.  Someone will ask, Your mom wore this?  

I did.  I wore that beautiful dress crafted with time and love from a woman who always gave me an abundance of both.  When I touched in that day full of nerves, her strength and love traveled through the ribbon to support me.  Just knowing that it’s up there in that tub with my baby clothes and red knit coat calms me.  

I think of her.  What a gift she gave. What a gift she was.