Unfinished business: reporting making daughter 2’s wedding dress 2
Time goes on. I have not had time to update this for sometime. Life happens and continues to happen but I choose today to record on here. I am in a place of completing ‘unfinished business’ again. In recent weeks I have been deliberately clearing out, giving away, finishing tasks started some time ago. Articles are being completed, sewing and knitting tasks being stitched. They will appear here in due course. Unfinished business was something I reflected on in the creation of the quilt. It is something that is part of Gestalt therapy, a recognition of needing to deal with things of the past so that we can move on. I don’t know much about that, but do know things have become built up and I am in that space of needing to clear the decks before the next phase. So this post is about that.
Daughter 2 was married in May 2016. Such a joy, and such an honour that she asked me when she was engaged to make her wedding dress. An honour, but also somewhat scary, as she had a particular idea and I needed to somehow create this idea without having a complete pattern! I had a joyous trip to London to buy material as there was nowhere who had the right beading locally in the southwest (I may have to open a shop when I retire…) and could have spent hours in the silk shop we discovered. Material bought, pattern decided and then life happened. I will not go into great detail but suffice to say a journey had to be taken through caring for ailing parents, work, my own family and my own health needs. Returning to home and the chance to sew was minimal, yet, when I did, making the dress became a place and space of grounding and therapy. (When I say this was ‘therapy’ to some they have looked at me in horror. How can making a dress, a wedding dress at that, be therapy? Well, it was; it was something slow and beautiful in a world that was frenetic and anxious, and, looking back now, I was grateful for the opportunity.)
The photos below illustrate part of the journey that was taken. Those who sew with rich materials will know the time it takes to prepare and cut things out to ensure things are the right size. I was grateful for a large table and also was careful to have a cloth underneath to prevent any dust or dirt getting on the material. Sadly I have lost other photos I took of the making until I got to the end. The next blog post will show this…
Cutting out
It begins
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