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| My 85 year old Granny Ott cutting out my wedding dress. |
My mom passed away a year and a half ago. She was a pack rat so it has taken me several months to go through all her things. One of the items that I brought to my house was an old trunk that had belonged to my great-great grandmother. I knew it was filled with a lot of old clothes and purses so I wasn’t in a hurry to go through it. A couple of days ago I decided that it was time to see what was in there. As I removed items I found a large white bag that felt pretty heavy. I opened it and inside was my wedding dress (I thought it was in a cedar chest that my sister took to her house). The dress is in mint condition and for not having been professionally sealed it is remarkably white. There’s a story about the dress that I want to share.
I was only 17 when I got married. In 1973 it was not unusual in the rural Ozark Mountains for girls to marry young right out of high school. I wanted to have a church wedding and wear a beautiful dress. Money was tight for my parents. They farmed and raised cattle and cattle prices had dropped to rock bottom that year. Mom said that I could have the church wedding, but we would have to do it on a shoestring budget. I bought Bride’s magazines and looked at all the dresses and found the style that I wanted. I knew that it would be a handmade dress but that was okay. My paternal grandmother, Granny Ott, had been one of the best seamstresses in our area and she made most of our clothes. Mom and I went to look at pattern books. In our world Simplicity, Butterick, and McCalls were where we got patterns. The dress pattern that I wanted wasn’t in any of those books, but it was in Vogue. Mom said that she would not pay that much for a pattern and that I would have to settle for a different pattern. We left the store with no pattern and me pouting. A few days later Mom came home with a wedding dress pattern that had belonged to my cousin. She told me that this would be my dress. I hated it! My cousin is 10 years older than me so the style was not at all what was in Bride’s Magazine. Mom stood firm and said that it was this dress or no dress! What could I do but “say yes to the dress.” We ordered bridal satin and when it came in my granny started to work on the dress. My cousin was 2 sizes bigger than me, so I thought that I had found an out, but no. My granny, who was 85 years old, cut the dress out of white cotton basting it up. Then I tried on the dress (which was huge) and she pinned and measured. The second try on was a good fit so it was time to make the dress out of the bridal satin. It was a very plain dress, and I got the idea that it needed some crocheted lace on it. This was in the Jessica McClintock era, and I was still trying to make the dress look more along that theme. I took the dress to my soon to be mother-in-law and she crocheted the lace right onto the neckline and cuffs.
As I look back on this, I realize what a treasure this dress is. My 85-year-old granny had to sit in a chair by the bed to cut out the dress. I can only imagine how hard it was for her to drag that heavy bridal satin around. She sewed on a treadle sewing machine. The wedding dress was also the last garment that she ever sewed. I think about what this dress would mean should my granddaughter ever want to wear it. It was sewn by her great-great grandmother and the lace was crocheted by her great grandmother. Sometimes things that seem so unfair to us become blessings once we have matured and lived life.
The wedding dress.
