Dresses, dresses everywhere!

As some of you know, I am making my wedding dress. For those who do not know...well now you do. I have permission to take my mother's wedding dress (above), and my grandmother's wedding dress (below) and combine them into the dress I will wear at my own wedding. That's right, this will be a third generation dress with fabric as new as yesterday combined with fabric that is 47 years old at least.

Currently I have both dresses in pieces, and am in the process of playing the life sized paper doll game rearranging the components until I find a style I want to keep.

I want everything about my wedding to be meaningful or symbolic and the dress is no exception.

• In asking permission to dismantle a garment they wore at their wedding, my "fore-mothers" allowed their creation to be molded into something new. Likewise they have given their blessing and permission to be taken from the family and joined in a union that will most certainly craft us into the people we will be 50 years from now.


• The act of dissecting these dresses gave me time to analyze the person and marriage these dresses came from. If I start my own marriage from scratch without any other influences, I will surely fail. Thank God I have examples to mirror success and learn from mistakes.


• The stage I am currently at is the building of the foundation. I have bare fabric that will be pinned with many different styles and pieces until I find what I want. If I just sewed my dress with the first style I made, I might never know the value of that decision, whether good or bad. The same goes for my life and commitment to my future husband. With Christ as our foundation, we will stand firm together no matter what life looks like. But marriage is about compromise (among many other things) and so it is only if we are both willing to change and adapt to fit each other's needs that our union becomes stronger. We learn which choices work, and which don't, which are strong, and which are weak.

It is only after testing these components that our marriage can begin to take form. Hopefully commitment with each other will turn out as beautiful as I hope my dress will. And may our families, values, and traditions remain as equally as entwined in our lives as the extensive history within my dress. I look forward to the results.