did you buy that new?

It's not dumb

  Posted by Jenny, the bloggess

This weekend I was at a vintage shop in Galveston and in an old armoire I saw a glimmer of satin.  I'm a whore for satin.  I started to pull it out and out came more and more and more champagne colored satin, with small bits of lace and pearls.  It was a wedding dress.  A 1940's...30 pound...slightly decomposing...wedding dress.   The shopkeeper absentmindedly named her price.  Forty dollars.

My husband and I looked at each other with wide eyes and stage-whispered "FORTY DOLLARS!" to each other except that he meant it like "Holy shit, can you believe she thinks anyone would spend $40 on this moldy wedding dress?" and I said it like "Holy shit, can you believe anyone would let this go for only $40?"  We fought about it for about 15 minutes before I finally realized he was an idiot as far as vintage wedding dresses were concerned and handed the shopgirl my credit card.  Every time I open the closet I see the dress and smile, wondering who wore such a beautiful gown.  Every time Victor opens the closet he looks at this giant wedding dress and grunts passive-aggressively while giving me the stink-eye.

I may have to wear it to my second wedding.

Vintage reworked

Posted by Jenny.

I adore all things vintage.  The smell, the feel, the idea that whatever I'm wearing is infused with so many memories.  That's why when I found this little dress at an antique convention I had to buy it for my three-year-old.  It's a 1950's  hand-made pillowcase that has been reworked into a child's dress.  The delicate cottony cloth of the pillowcase, the end product of a hundred gentle washings, is soft and tactile and perfect and almost makes me want to learn how to sew so that I could rescue all those gorgeous, lacey pillow-cases from thrift store bins and give them all a second life as a beautiful dress.  You know...almost.

But what I really want is for someone to make me a dress like that although it'd have to be out of a queen sized bed sheet to fit me and really?  Who would go around in a dress made out of a bedsheet?  *cough*