Our 30th anniversary was Sunday Sept. 16th and I wanted a new dress to wear to church. I could live with the fact that we didn’t get to take that trip to Montana for this milestone. I could live with the fact that there would be no special get-together with family and friends to celebrate 30 years of love and commitment. Truth be told, I’ve always considered wedding anniversaries kind of private, just the two of us; our special day. But I really wanted a new dress because, even after 30 years, I wanted to look extra pretty for my fella’, so I went shopping and found…. nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. There was nothing in the stores that interested me one bit. So, being the resourceful person I am and having enough fabric hoarded away to open my own fabric store (don’t ask), I decided to make myself a dress. Nothing too fancy, just a nice simple pull-over dress out of a lovely print. I happened to have a pretty floral with just the right amount of yardage to make this:
A few hours of cutting and sewing and I had the makings of a new outfit. As you can see, it’s sleeveless and there’s no way I’m taking my saggy bare arms out in public, so it’s another trip to the store to find some kind of jacket to go over the dress. What I had in mind was a cute little short sleeve sweater in this pretty caramel brown, as I thought it would be a really nice complement to the navy background of the dress fabric. I just love khaki and blue together.
Being in a crunch, I did not have time to do much shopping. On Saturday evening, I went to a couple of stores to see what I could come up with. No cute little caramel colored short sleeve sweaters to be found. However, I did come across something that I thought would work with the dress. It’s not what I had originally pictured and wasn’t my first choice, but beggars can’t be choosers and I really wanted to wear the new dress to church, so I settled. The winter white is a perfect match to the white in the floral print and it has navy blue trim to boot. It was on the clearance rack at 70% off and was missing a button, but that wasn’t a problem as I have a pretty substantial button collection. After a little deliberation, I decided to go ahead and buy it and wound up paying a whopping $4.14 after tax! Now that’s something I can live with. I sewed on a rhinestone button to match the rhinestones next to the blue trim and took myself off to church Sunday morning with a smart new outfit that did in fact please my sweetheart, and me too. Turns out necessity is the mother of invention just like my Mama said.
