A New Dress

Catherine DiMedici

Let the designing begin!

Venice, 1583

Fabric has been selected, basic design has been approved (sister Katy once again doing an original for this coming year's Lady Chamberlain, Emma), and now getting the dress from paper to reality is my task over the next several weeks.

close up view of bodice inspiriation

I will be giving updates throughout the process....

Austen, Beauty, Cinema

This morning, the man about the house and I were discussing whether we preferred the movie adaptations of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. In different areas I think both excel over the other. Some are from comparing the cinematic with the literary. Others are just preference. Seeing as G. has not read her books, his only point of reference is the likability of each movie as it stands on its own.

This morning's topic reminded me of a recent Times article about the Rice portrait's accuracy concerning her beauty. It is interesting to note that all the heroines of recent interpretation have been played by beautiful women (Knightly, Thompson, Paltrow) and in the upcoming Jane Austen movie, she is even portrayed by the stunning Anne Hathaway. The controversy regarding her own physical features and our own imaginings of the beauty of her literary counterparts intrigues me.

Why do we continue to define beauty by things that clearly fade? This cannot be true, and in fact in God's society, isn't. "What matters is not your outer appearance—the styling of your hair, the jewelry you wear, the cut of your clothes—but your inner disposition. Cultivate inner beauty, the gentle, gracious kind that God delights in."

And now I am chastised within. What am I teaching my three daughters?

Being Different

It has taken some time to return here, and in the lapse I have thought frequently about Paul's question "How are you different?".

Hopefully I've learned more about myself and grown through mistakes. I've experienced grace, reconciliation, reunion, breaking away and the bond between parent and child being forced into a new type of relationship.


I've begun a new decade of living, and with it unexpected physical changes and a renewed assessment of who I am apart from my husband and children. My entire adult life has been centered on these relationships and how they define me. "I am a wife. I am a mother." I am also someone besides that.

When my grandmother died, my aunt wrote a poem in her honor. Ruth prefaced it with these words:

"The whole of her (Barbara's) personal writings, however, speaks clearly of her equally real inner conflict which was...deep...namely, her struggle with the other side of the paradox common to every true Christ-follower: fulfillment of self, or, becoming fully the person God created."

That's what I want. I don't want to be 50, 60, or 80 and wonder if I really was embracing the person God created to its fullest.


So who am I? I don't want to be defined by what happens to me, but by the development of the person I was created to become. That is the legacy to leave for the people I love and give it in return.