Every donation is genuinely appreciated, and when I get to personally collect a donation I can see the memories play back as the donor passes on their special gown to me. Some times we receive donations that stand out from the rest, like the donation we’ll be talking about today in this blog.
The donor wishes to stay anonymous, and we will respect that. To make writing this blog easier I have chosen a random gender neutral name and the donor shall be referred to as Addison from here on end.
Addison and I became friends through social media. Chatting for long stretches at a time and then long silences in between but a friendship grew. One day during one of our ritualistic catching-up sessions I told Addison about TAGI and Addison was intrigued.
As per usual life went on and one day Addison told me about a possible donation heading my way but didn’t want to get my hopes up. Then finally Addison told me there’s a couple of flower girl dresses for me. That had me super excited, because a couple implies at least two dresses!
On Addison’s next excursion to our humble little coastal town we finally got to meet in person. This meeting was long overdue and we both were looking forward to. And not just because of the dresses! After the hugging and hello Addison tells me to go have a look in the boot of the car… and then.. goosebumps!
Six black bags stuffed to overflowing! We carried them all inside and started to pack them all out one dress at a time. There were many laughs and jokes, trying to figure out all the fashions, appreciating all the history and the colours! My word, so many colours!
This was by far the biggest donation to date! Because there were so many dresses I’m not going to insert all their individual photos into the blog, but rather several galleries below. Here is a break down: Flower girl dresses as follows; 3 in lavender, 3 in royal blue, 2 in light blue, 2 in red, 1 in canary yellow, 2 in soft yellow, 4 in peach, 1 in green, 1 in bright pink and 6 in baby pink. That makes a total of 25 flower girl dresses! But the generosity does not end there…
There is also 11 mini wedding gowns (it was an era thing from the 80’s if I recall) AND an additional 11 wedding gowns and a satin top. All in all this makes a total of 48 individual garments! A few days later Addison brought another wedding gown, bringing the total up to 49 garments!
The gowns come in a variety of colour, trim and fabric. We have already started processing some of the gowns into Angel Gown® garments but this will be an ongoing process. We will continue to fill on to the Angel Gown® gallery and note if we are still in the process of repurposing all of these gowns.
So far we’ve only made 108 Angel Gown® garments from one of the gowns, but much much more is coming! As of 23 May 2018 one third of the Angel Gown® garments produced in our first year can be contributed this album.
Thank you Addison for your generosity – this was an important booster to The Angel Gown® Initiative! We would also like to thank Siobhan Plunkett for modelling some of the gowns for us.
Eric Elronde and the TAGI team.
