Flashback: Blue Spot

 

Jeans-American Eagle Outfitters, Red flats-American Eagle
(they're not the same company, believe it or not), Flowered shirt and fingerless glove-DIY

 I haven't done a fashion post in awhile (something I intend to begin remedying once I finish reading blasted Anna Karenina), so I fished these two images out of my own personal archives. These pictures are from a rainy day a few weeks into my new marriage and a few days into my first semester at Roberts. So much had changed, and I was craving the familiarity and routine the summerhad provided. To make things worse, I had chosen to wear . . .

The shirt.

I had worn the shirt in the above picture on my last day of work before marrying Josh in the summer of 2010. I worked as a head counselor at Sayre Summer Recreation, a local day camp lasting eight weeks and featuring a new series of workshops each week. The shirt started out as a basic white v-neck, but did not stay that way after a few moments of an Art Graffiti workshop with 80 kindergarteners through fifth-graders. Blue paint from a spray bottle struck me in the chest, and one of my favorite shirts was ruined, or so I thought.

Photo credit

Weeks later, as I sat lonely one afternoon on Roberts campus, missing the kids I had grown to love so over the past several summers, I became determined to save the shirt in which so many bittersweet memories were wrapped up. I marched outside with several bowls of watered-down acrylic paint and began painting a Monet-like masterpiece up one side of the shirt with the blue spot on the chest.

It was an attempt to cling to something that, in a way, anchored me to my concrete past instead of discarding all of that in favor of an uncertain future.

The shirt dried into something of a watercolor masterpiece. It's now one of my favorite items of clothing, and I get many compliments on the unique garment. I only try to shy away from wearing it during those times when that blue spot shows up on my heart and I am tempted to weep for the loss of the simplicity of my younger days. On those days when it rains inside and out, I usually find it best to stick to outfits that don't evoke emotional meltdowns . . .

Let's try to act like a grown, married woman here ;-)