The stained glass dress (as i decided to name it, after hanging it up on a glass door and seeing the sun stream through it), was a Target brand double bed sized cotton fitted bed sheet.

I ripped it into pieces in one of the first weeks that Josh and I lived together in our new home, and started naturally dyeing it with our food scraps- thrilled that I could take up a whole burner on the stove without guilt that I’d be taking up too much space (I’d mainly lived with 3-5 other people before this move).

The dress feels like a snapshot of a moment in time that was both fraught and so joyful, May/June 2020 and Nov 2020 (I made it during election week) - the foods that nourished our bodies during a pandemic, a bedsheet that was otherwise just taking up space. An outlet for me, a gentle way to commune with creativity, but with low stakes. I simmered pots on the stove while I worked, checking on them during lunch breaks and pee breaks, hanging them to dry on our tiny, makeshift clothesline. I dyed with avocado pits I’d saved for weeks, then their skins, shifted some with baking soda, some with iron. I did not take notes, I just did it.

I dyed others with a big batch of yellow onion skins, and another with carrot tops (which mostly turned out putrid, so I overdyed those with iron). I exhausted baths of black tea, and used up bags of mixed onion and turmeric root. Our freezer is half full of my dyestuffs.

After I finished dyeing them, I washed & dried them all, folded them neatly & proclaimed to the internet that your stash didn’t have to be “fancy” or “expensive” to be delightful! I felt very pleased with myself. I taped some of the pieces up on a wall one day - I knew where I was going with it, but not quite exactly how I was going with it.

I brought the fabric pieces with me, along with my sewing machine, in our car on our cross country roadtrip to see Josh’s parents. In a little house on the coast of Maine, the pieces clicked - a dress it would become. I sewed it together with thread from my grandmother’s stash, the hems and binding made of this raspberry tone - I wonder if she bought it to match a fabric she had?

This dress exemplifies many lessons for me - learning french seams, learning how to french seam and make my first in-seam pockets, needlepoint applique (to cover a stain), tracing my pattern on newspaper, and learning how to unpick a seam & add a panel when I cut the wrong size (still dialing that one in).

This dress is an object full of curiosity and making do. It doesn’t sit right on my shoulders, but I don’t mind. I’m becoming increasingly okay with letting things just be what they are. It feels full of ideas sparked in Tamar Adler’s “An Everlasting Meal”, it feels resourceful and somehow not-quite-but-just-enough and I am really, really proud of it.