I’m on the plane home to San Jose after visiting my wedding dress in the Fabric of America exhibit at The Henry Ford. It was an amazing experience. I’m still processing it.

Part of it was seeing my dress mounted as part of a featured exhibit at a major museum. I spent a good chunk of time just standing in the exhibit, staring at my dress surrounded by other amazing works, not believing that it had been chosen for the exhibit. (Pinch me!) But I had to admit to myself that it held its own, even in such illustrious company. People were stopping to look at it and gasping, “It’s so beautiful!”

But a lot of it was just the trip down memory lane. So many memories! Not just the making of the dress, or the wedding, but also of nearly 20 years spent with A, and how we both evolved over the course of our two decades together.

Our first date, in 2006, at Coupa Cafe, Palo Alto. Somehow, the topic of food came up, and I mentioned a Miss Manners quote that I loved: “Food is so important to American romance that if there’s no food, it isn’t a date.”

We talked for hours, and eventually I suggested that we go across the street to Nola’s for dinner. A. looked at me and said, “Does this mean this is now a date?” I laughed and said yes.

Four years later. We were settling in comfortably together. Weaving was my latest hobby – I’d taken it up shortly after A. and I got together, and I loved it.

I’d signed up for a workshop with legendary weaving teacher Sharon Alderman about designing fabric for a specific purpose. I was racking my brains trying to think of something so complicated and difficult that I’d need Sharon Alderman’s advice for it. Eventually I decided on the most challenging thing I could think of: a handwoven wedding dress. I figured “I’m only 40-ish. I’ll probably get married at SOME point – if not to A, then to someone else, eventually. And I love the idea of making my own wedding dress from fabric I wove myself.”

I designed a set of samples that I thought would be appropriate. I wanted to incorporate symbolism into the fabric (which would also make it more interesting to weave!), so I spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to render the double-happiness Chinese character in a 24-shaft draft. (I’d only just started designing my own drafts, so this was quite a stretch.)

Here’s the draft:

(The “double happiness” character symbolizes a happy marriage. It’s the character for “happiness” written twice, then merged into a single character. I can’t imagine a better way to express “happy relationship” than that.)

I also became fascinated by the eternity knot, also called the Buddha’s knot.

So I designed an eternity-knot draft, too.

I went to the workshop and Sharon helped me create my samples:

I returned home and blogged about my samples, being careful to say, “A and I are not engaged – this is a strictly theoretical wedding dress!”

Well. A. read my blog, came by my craft room, and said, “You know, I really wouldn’t mind being married to you….”

Not the most romantic proposal, but the wedding was on!

It took me an entire year to make the dress. I wasn’t a very experienced weaver, so I made a ton of mistakes, including one egregious one that forced me to re-weave ten full yards of fine silk fabric. (I still describe the dress as “the triumph of obstinacy over ignorance”. Setback after setback, but I. Would. Not. Quit.)

I eventually wove a total of 32 yards of fabric – 16 for the coat, and 16 for the dress. (Plus the ten yards that I had to discard!)

I also wanted to use couture sewing techniques, about which I knew absolutely nothing. After a long search, I found Sharon Bell, an experienced couture seamstress and former dean of a fashion school. At each stage, she showed me what to do, and I did it. She was the brains behind the wedding dress! We became fast friends in the process. I still miss her.

So much else went into the dress. My mother-in-law bought me two yards of imported Alencon lace at Britex Fabrics after she saw me looking longingly at it but frowning at the price tag. I cut the lace into individual motifs and appliqued each motif separately to the bodice of the dress to get the design I wanted.

Tiny, almost invisible stitches, a lot of them. Five rows of stitching, four done by hand, in the hem of the dress. Sharon laughing at me when I fretted over a small piece of fabric that I had to add near the bottom of the dress because the fabric was too narrow for one panel. “Don’t worry – the guy on the floor looking at your hem is going to be too drunk to care!”

The dress took an entire year, working in every spare moment, to complete. I estimated over 1,000 hours spent working on the dress and coat, start to finish.

When I put the last stitch in, I set it down on the table, looked at it, and realized: this is a masterpiece.

I had done interesting work, even beautiful work, before, but nothing with this scope, ambition, or perfection. It was (and still is) closer to perfection than anything else I’ve ever made. It was a tribute to my two loves, craft and A.

The wedding went beautifully, except that my mother, who had flown out for the event, was briefly hospitalized and couldn’t attend. So we left the reception early and flew through the hospital in full wedding regalia to visit her in the hospital. We got quite a few odd looks in the hallway!

Fast forward a few more years. The curator at the American Textile History Museum reached out to me – she was looking for wedding dresses with interesting stories for an exhibit she was putting together, and someone had told her about my dress and its saga. I was delighted to see it in their exhibit Behind the Veil: Brides and their Stories.

I was even more delighted a little while later, when the ATHM acquired it for their collection. I had worried what would happen to the dress when I passed – I have no children, and the idea of it going to an estate sale was heartbroken. I was excited to know that it would have a permanent home.

Alas, the American Textile History Museum closed a few years later. That precipitated a nail-biting year as they worked on transferring their collection to other institutions. I had no idea what was going to happen to my dress – whether it would go to another museum, be sold, or (heaven forbid) discarded. Nobody could (or would?) tell me anything. I tried to be patient and philosophical, without much success.

I was delighted to hear, a year later, that most of the costume collection (including my dress) had gone to The Henry Ford Museum. The Henry Ford is a major and well-funded institution, so it would be safe there.

I didn’t think much about the dress for the next ten years. Life went on, with twists and turns. My marriage took a sharp turn around 2020, when A. came out as transgender. Instead of a husband, I suddenly had a wife.

We stayed together for another five years. I helped her through her early years of transition. Some of it was fun – I got to show her how to put on pantyhose, and helped her pick out colors for her new clothes. Some of it was much harder, like helping her navigate the change from cis man to trans woman. Suddenly she went from the top of the social pecking order to near the bottom. When we were out and about, I often accompanied her to bathrooms because she was terrified of being attacked by anti-trans bigots for the “crime” of using the ladies’ room.

There were other transformations that had to be made, like reshaping her self-identity. To give you some idea of the magnitude of this, think back to all the experimentation that probably happened in your teen years. What did you wear and what did it say about you? Who did you hang out with, who was your tribe? How did you relate to other people?

So much of society is hard-coded around “what men do” and “what women do”. We cis people spend the first seventeen or eighteen years of our lives learning what it means to be a man or a woman in our society, both externally and internally. For someone who transitions in midlife, all that learning and identity shift has to be concentrated into a few short years. That would be incredibly difficult even if trans people weren’t the target of so much hatred.

So it was difficult for A. It was tough for me too, because waking up one morning and discovering that your husband is actually your wife is a bit of a shock.

We navigated that transition with considerably more grace than anyone (including us) could have expected, but after five or six years it became clear that we really were headed in different directions. For us to continue growing, we needed to live separate lives.

So we spent last year working out the divorce, home sale, move. She went to Seattle; I spent three months in Mexico before returning to San Jose. We’re still friends, and text each other daily, but we’re no longer partners.

Then the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles decided they’d like to exhibit my wedding dress in their show Soft Sculptures at the end of 2026. So I wrote to The Henry Ford to ask if they would consider loaning my dress to SJMQT. They replied to say “Yes, but we’re actually exhibiting it this summer, so they might have to wait until the exhibit closes in the fall.”

WHAT???? I had had absolutely no inkling that it was to be in the exhibit. I was delighted – I had honestly never expected to see it again. The Henry Ford has over a million items in their collection, far more than can ever be exhibited. For them to pick out my dress from that enormous collection seemed unimaginable. I was happy just knowing that it was safe in a collection.

So I wangled an invitation to the exhibit reception, and bought plane tickets.

And there I was, looking at my dress. 15 years since I made it. So many changes, so many twists and turns. And in some way immortal now, safe in a museum collection.

I don’t expect I’ll ever see the dress again, except maybe briefly at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles exhibit. Museums generally don’t show the same item over and over, so I expect that by the next time it’s exhibited I’ll have long passed. So this trip was really a capstone to the entire wedding era.

So much time…so many memories.