Party clothes: color them vibrant!

If you've ever spent too long looking at old photos and documents so the past feels black and white, check out these ancestral fabric scraps below and imagine how the dresses in those photos really looked. My grandmother had a collection of tiny fabric clippings in an envelope that her mother Blanche had saved from her mother and grandmothers, with notes of who they belonged to. Each piece is only an inch by two inches long.

"worn by mother (Annie Hatch) when she went to Salt Lake City to get married, age 20 (1873)"

Annie, about that age, in a plaid dress--could it be that fabric above?

"bought by Grandfather L.H. Hatch when he courted Mother"--which documents the story of Annie being first courted by Lorenzo Hill Hatch as a plural wife, but marrying instead his son Lorenzo Lafayette Hatch

interestingly, you can see the more faded version of that same fabric above in Annie's quilt 

"waist worn by Mother (Annie) at the age of 15 years"

"Ribbon brought from England by Grandmother Fox" (1861--chevron was cool then!)

"worn by Grandmother Fox in later years" (she died in 1906)

"worn by Grandmother Sylvia Hatch" (she died in 1904)

I love imagining our ancestral party guests in these rich, beautiful fabrics and how it brings them to life for me, and I'm grateful for my great-grandmother's efforts to save them. Such surprising bright colors after more than a century!