Gray Shale

Velvet Beach Winter

Velvet and Leaves

Dress: Vintage dress with velvet detail and attached crinoline
Label: There is no label
Fiber Content: Wool, velvet
Year purchased: November, 2005
Purchase price: Traded for a knit item to be made at a later date.
Store: Kristen’s Vintage Trunk show
Additional information/Oddities: This dress is slightly large on me. Also, when I look at it in the light, I wonder if it is not balck at all, but a very deep navy blue.
How I wear it: With stockings and heels.

I wore this dress with vintage heels (which I found at Salvation Army) to Thanksgiving 2005. I was amazed at how well the shoes matched the dress.

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There was a girl who was in my year at college. Our freshman year, she only wore black, predominantly vintage dresses.

I was impressed by her wardrobe, but not overly impressed by her. She was mean. She was overly enamored of her own coolness. She used to always make a casual reference to her years as a teen model. She was smart, but no smarter than everyone else, but you could tell she thought she was smarter and prettier and just cooler in general than everyone else (though she was a good deal less goofy and silly than myself and probably handled the whole college transition better than I did, so maybe she just considered herself superior to me.)

She gained a lot of weight over the next couple of years. This made me extremely happy, though I am ashamed to admit this. I shouldn't weight gain in another person as a cause for celebration, no matter how smug and deserving teh recipient of teh extra pounds may have been. I am shallow and petty.

She stopped wearing black dresses.

She became very involved with the campus women’s (Womyn's, Wimmin's) group and seemed to stop wearing dresses entirely. She wrote articles for the school newspaper blaming men for the evils in the world and she seemed to always mention how she had an eating disorder in high school while modeling.

I only remembered her recently as I was working on this project. I keep thinking about how intimidating she was and about her wardrobe and I wonder if I have, in some way, become her. I am not the most friendly of people. Perhaps I, with my black dresses and prickly persona, make other people as uncomfortable as she made me.

Of course, I never was a teen model.

Crawly

Mist

On A Log

Dress: Long sleeve, scoop neck long dress with flare skirt. The side seams come to very subtle points (as opposed to being rounded off, as most skirts are.)
Label: Ralph RL Lauren
Fiber Content: 90% Rayon, 10% Spandex
Year purchased: June, 2004
Purchase price: $2.00
Store: Salvation Army on Clybourn
Additional information/Oddities: This dress is a good examples of why designer clothes are so wonderful and, if it is something you will wear, totally worth the money. Of course that is easy to say when I am talking about a dress for which I am positive I paid no more than $3. This dress really does look terrific though. My only problem is that I think it may be a very dark navy blue and not black at all. This is one of those things that's hard to tell as blacks don't always match.
How I wear it: When I have worn this dress, I have worn opaque tights with it. This is more a function of not having shaved my legs than anything else. Also, winter is not a really great time to walk around with bare legs.

I bought this dress to wear during pregnancy. However, I can't recall if I actually did so, which probably means I didn't since, I feel I have established that I have this completely useless ability to remember everything regarding clothing. Unfortunately, I have no idea where I left my keys.

I did wear it to the parent orientation for Julian's school. I was very nervous and thought that if looked sophisticated and pulled together, it would help me feel better. I also wore this dress on Julian's first birthday. We went to school and brought snacks that day-we had baked an organic pumpkin bread for the occasion and Julian loved it. Then, after Julian had a nap, we took him to my mom's house and Fred and I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was the first movie we saw in a movie theatre after Julian's birth. Then Abigail and Melanie came over to throw Julian a party, which didn't really mean much to him as he was only one and he hated the party hats, but liked their gift (a box of musical instruments) and we can say we did something on his birthday when he is a difficult adolescent and demanding proof of our love.

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What people never tell you about pregnancy:

1. Your breasts will grow. People will tell you this, but they will neglect to tell you by how much. Expect to grow an extra set (i.e. if you are a B cup, expect to become a D cup. If you are a C, expect to start buying sizes not sold in Victoria's Secret.)
2. People will irritate you more than you thought possible. Some suggest this is a result of the massive hormones coursing through your veins. This is only partially true. The larger reason, however, is that people are truly more irritating while you are pregnant. Everyone has advice, opinions, suggestions, and criticisms about absolutely everything you do. Get used to it. All these people will be there with their advice, opinions, suggestions, and criticisms in regards to the way you will raise that baby that is currently growing inside of you. The reason this happens is people suck.
3. Expect all your unresolved issues to bubble to the surface, demanding attention. This is probably your brains way of turning you into a grownup (hey, get the therapy now, before the baby is born.)
4. Those nine months will be the longest of your life. But you will forget them. Slowly. This is the human species' way of ensuring that it doesn't die out. If we remembered what pregnancy was like, we would all have only one child.

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Dress: Long sleeve, v-neck long dress with straight skirt to ankles.
Label: Lauren Ralph Lauren
Fiber Content: 93% Rayon, 7% Lycra
Year purchased: January 2006
Purchase price: $3.00
Store: Salvation Army on Clybourn
Additional information/Oddities: For one very long tube, this dress is surprisingly sexy.

When one has as many dresses as I have, there comes the point when one may run the risk of inadvertently buying a dress I already own. This has not yet happened. However, the casual reader would be forgiven for assuming that this did occur with the above dress. You will have to take my word for it when I tell you that it is unique and different from the other Ralph Lauren dress. It is a very nice, sophisticated dress made out of a jersey material which is perfect for winter. Like the other dress, I can wear it if I ever get pregnant again, but it isn't strictly a maternity dress.

I have worn it a few times. The only time worth mentioning was when we went to the AAA office to get new passport photos to get new passports (the replacement passports we were issued in Costa Rica were about to expire. Why were we issued replacement passports in Costa Rica? Well, because our passports were stolen because some guys slashed the rental car tires and then offered to "help" us when we were stranded on the side of a mountain road. When I think of all the things which could have happened to us, I feel like we were extremely lucky.)

A Maternity Dress and How I Felt When I Was Pregnant

Winter Cadeau 1

Winter Cadeau 3

Winter Cadeau 2

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Dress: Peasant dress with lace trim
Label: Cadeau
Fiber Content: 100% Cotton
Year purchased: August, 2004.
Purchase price: $20.00
Store: Belly Dance on Damen.
Additional information/Oddities: This is one of the only official maternity dresses I bought during my pregnancy and I bought it because the store was having this absolutely insane sale where all these things on their clearance rack were only $20 apiece. The dress is an XS, which I bought because it fit, but in truth, I would have preferred the small if they had it because my breasts (which grew three cup sizes during my pregnancy) are so prominently displayed that it is practically indecent. It is a great dress for summer.
How I wear it: With a good bra.

I was wearing this dress when a man hit on me at the grocery store when I was seven months pregnant. He got flustered when I pointed this out to him, and I couldn’t blame him because, in this dress, people’s eyes couldn’t help but be fixated on the chest. It was like trying not to stare at the sun. Or a car wreck. This is a great dress because, despite the extra space for a tummy, it works really well even after losing all the baby weight.

I have worn this dress a few times post-partum. And not “I just had a baby” post-partum, but “I have lost all my baby weight and still chose this dress” post-partum. Which I feel is a pretty huge indication of how cool this dress is.

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How I Felt When I Was Pregnant

Everyone else may look at me and think nothing has changed.

Everyone says what I am going through is normal and natural.

But it is too much, too weird, too impossible to even comprehend rationally. I am making placenta. I am creating a human. I am providing a home for a new creature. But I feel lost.

In the film Alien a creature is implanted inside a human body and the creature feeds on its host until it is ready for living on its own, then it violently bursts from the host’s body, leaving behind a bloody mess. Good science fiction. But now it isn’t fiction, it is my future. The difference is that in real life, my body has been constructed to feed the creature even after it tears me apart and my brain has been constructed so that the creature will emotionally tear me apart repeatedly for the rest of my life.

I am clearly not thinking positively. I guess I bought into the stuff that people always tell you about pregnancy: that it is a beautiful time in a woman’s life, that one’s body is fulfilling its biological function. I was unprepared for the fatigue, the nausea, the dizziness, the acne. I didn’t realize that pregnancy would augment my sense of isolation, because while I may have always believed that no one could understand what I was experiencing, that has become painfully true.

I was unprepared for how much I would fear of the future.

The Pics

I can't seem to be motivated to write and I am feeling an overwhelming urge to get rid of a lot of the lesser black dresses. However, I have lots of photos. And I have some text which needs to be reviewed.

Please let me know your thoughts. I'll keep trying to get the big pieces left undone finished and then, well, I'll look at your kind words and take them into account for the next big overhaul.