The Yellow Dress

When I was a young child, there was a huge production of ‘Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat’ at my school.   It involved a full visiting orchestra and other notable signers, and was quite the event!  It was SO exciting to be part of it.  The songs were great – happy, sad, poignant, and of course the iconic rousing finale.  

I was in the choir and on the left of the front row, being one of the youngest and therefore shortest.  Back then, choirs would still sometimes wear long dresses but it was touch and go as to what you should wear, so I asked my friends what they were going to do.   I had both long and short at home.    

They said long.  You can probably guess the rest…

I found myself standing as a young, tender, twelve or thirteen year old in full sight in a long bright yellow dress.   It wasn’t a dress I particularly liked anyway and you can imagine how it might stick out like a sore thumb.  

I felt humiliation, embarrassment, and anger at my friends who were all wearing short dresses.  I just wanted to find a hole, curl up in it and never come out.  It was excruciating beyond words.  

The performance was a huge success and I did manage to enjoy it.  It was in the papers and it felt amazing to have been part of it all.   Who knew it would stay with me for years to come for all the wrong reasons as well as the right ones? 

It’s only in writing this that I realise the irony of Joseph’s technicolour coat and how that must have stood out like a sore thumb, too.  He was proud to wear his highly visible garment unlike me who couldn’t get out of the long dress quick enough! 

So… here I am, quietly hand-stitching over a long yellow dress.   I’m reasonably hopeless at dressmaking and have zero interest in making garments so this is a cheap over-sized cotton one I sourced.   I cut up the side seams and shoulders so I could stitch the fabric more easily and as it’s too big it will have allowance to make up again.   The mission is to subvert my inner narrative and to transform a dress by slowly, slowly changing its colour one patch or stitch at a time.  

I’m doing what I love; playing with colour, hand-stitching in a way that I find soothing and healing and eventually, possibly, I may try it on and see how it feels.

Like all creativity, we rarely know all the answers when we start out so I don’t know if there will be even a few yellow stitches on it or not. I might feel the yellow underneath needs covering or that I want to allow it to stay because that has something to say, too.  I have no idea how the colours and stitch will drift and look as a whole yet.   But for now, it’s getting some blue and that blue feels SO good!  

If I was to put it on eventually, I would hope it would feel like healing for this tiny trauma that I remember too well.   It may even end up front row and visible somewhere.  Like Joseph, I may feel happy for others to see my technicolour dress.   (Although I hope it wouldn’t get me into the kind of trouble it brought him! 🤭) That’s to be decided.  

Right now however, although I’m telling you my story, I’m doing it just for me.   It’s the act of covering and stitching that feels cathartic and meaningful.  

For an artist, “I don’t know” is the hard time. It is the season between seasons when you are not sure what you are making and if you are making anything worth-while….
If we knew, always, what it is we know, there would be no new land to push forward to. We would do and redo what it is we do -and that is not the artist’s life. Ours is a life of invention.” Julia Cameron

I’m inventing a dress. 

It won’t be yellow.