There is something slightly strange about this when I examine it: a dress I had been imagining for years that waited for a specific occasion to become real. It is not that I had been planning a wedding from the age of twenty. I had not. It is more that the dress was a kind of latent knowledge — something I knew how to make and knew I would make, waiting for the moment when it had a purpose.
When I talk about the dress as a record of time, this is part of what I mean. The time in the dress is not only the nine months of construction. It is also the years before that, when the image lived in my head without a body to be made for. All of that time went into the dress when I finally cut the silk. All of that is there, invisible, in the object.
This is the part I could not explain to my mother and did not try to. Some things are not explainable. You can describe the hours and the thread and the fabric and the process and still not land the full weight of what you made and why it was what it was. You have to have made a thing to know that.
## The Embroidery as Practice
I took the embroidery class when I was twenty-five because I was in a period where I needed something that was unconnected from anything else in my life. I was in a job I did not fully love yet. I was in a city that had not yet become mine. I was in a state of general uncertainty that is probably just what being twenty-five is, but which felt, at the time, specific and urgent.