Chapter Twenty
It took Rosie several days to screw up the effort to even view the damage she’d done to her wedding dress.
Since that afternoon, she’d almost been on auto-pilot.
She went to work, she ordered her shopping, she opened a tin of soup when she got hungry.
She still couldn’t believe what she’d done.
In any other dress deconstruction, she had spent hours painstakingly unpicking the seams to preserve as much of the material as possible. This was just vandalism.
She’d heard stories about jealous wives cutting up their husbands’ suits, or jilted husbands slashing their wives’ clothes, and had always wondered if people who exhibited that sort of behaviour were a bit unhinged, but maybe their partners had cheated on them too.
The same old questions whirled round and round inside her head: When had the affair started?
How had she not noticed? Was it because she’d been too boring for James?
Over the years, she had continually put his needs and wishes before her own, but now she was fed up of being dutiful and doing the same old things just because people expected you to.
What was wrong with wanting something different?
James hadn’t been creative, he hadn’t understood why she’d suddenly want to paint the walls a bright colour, or design a special dress that cost the earth which you might only wear a handful of times.
But Connor did. She recalled his kind comments after the Bridge Park Christmas Spectacular:
You’re wasted at Pennewicks. You could set up your own business
That afternoon, sitting on the sofa, it had been such a relief to be able to talk to someone who hadn’t known James.
Who wasn’t going to trot out platitudes like: Oh, but he seemed such a lovely person.
She’d had plenty of sympathetic comments and commiseration cards after he died. She wasn’t sure that it helped.
Of course Connor had been shocked at what she’d done to the dress, but he understood the frustration of feeling hemmed in by circumstances, and that opportunities were out there if only you knew how to grasp them.
That’s what she needed to do: take the opportunities life presented, not watch them sail past leaving regrets in their wake. Maybe next time she wouldn’t be so reserved.
As she sat the table and stared at her handiwork, she tried to think not about why she’d done it, but how she could move forward.
It wouldn’t be straightforward to repair the cuts, although there wasn’t any point even if she could, because with a sudden flash of clarity, Rosie knew exactly what she wanted to do with the material.
*
It took a lot longer than she expected to make the first dress – two full evenings – but she was pleased with what she had achieved.
She had found a pattern online and adapted it slightly to make the skirt a little fuller, and this time around she used her scissors carefully to ensure the fabric was cut as economically as possible.
The miniature dress had a tulle underskirt and a column of tiny pearl buttons down the back, although for ease of use, these were sewn over a Velcro fastening.
She took a photo and sent it to Connor. The reply came back within seconds:
OMG – did you make that? It’s fantastic! You need your own brand label!
She smiled. Trust Connor to think of branding.
It wasn’t for sale though; this little dress would clothe someone’s angel baby.
She knew how it felt to lose something so precious, and she hoped that whoever received this dress would know she was thinking of them and understood their pain.
Maybe she did need a label with it after all.
She decided to experiment on a piece of old cotton first, just to see what it would look like.
She hadn’t used the lettering function on her sewing machine for ages and hoped she could still remember how it worked.
After a few trials and a couple of errors, she managed to set up the letters and the font, then threaded up the pink cotton on the machine.
Finally, she pressed the green button and watched as the machine sprang into life.
As it whirred away, she thought about the first sewing machine she had ever used.
It had belonged to her gran, and was a very heavy, manually operated Singer sewing machine, which came with its own table.
As a child, Rosie was allowed to have a go, under supervision, and she had loved turning the handle and watching the needle bob up and down through the material.
She wondered what Gran would say if she could see this piece of technology embroidering all by itself and at such a speed you could hardly see the needle move.
She was pleased with the results. Made with Love, it said, above a small pink rose. She could embroider this onto a leftover piece of satin and then sew it onto the inside of the dress.
The following evening, she worked out how many angel dresses she could make from the material and started marking out pattern pieces.
She kept all the scraps as they could be used for labels, or decoration.
By the time she dropped into bed shortly after midnight, her head was buzzing with new ideas.