Author Archive

Sandy died peacefully at home on Tuesday, May 24, 2011. High school sweetheart of Rod; loving mother of Mark (Andrea Whiting) of Toronto, and Alison (Ken McLeod), of Hamilton; beloved sister of Robert Illingworth (Sharon) and John Illingworth (Elizabeth) of Thunder Bay; proud and fulfilled Pippa of Molly and Emerson. Sandy was a woman of high spirits, eternal optimism, common sense and an old soul with the touch of a rebel. If anyone needed a friend, they could always turn to her knowing that she would not only listen but also offer wise advice. Sandy lived many lives and excelled at them all: primary school teacher, interior designer, real estate broker, and art student. In 2000 she enrolled at the Ontario College of Art and Design to unleash the skills that would allow her innate artistic talents to flourish. In no rush to finish what would normally have been a four-year program, Sandy graduated with her diploma in 2010 and loved every moment with her far younger fellow students. Member of the Garden Club of Toronto and an honorary Southern Belle of the Washington, D.C. chapter. Remembrances may be made to the Sandy McQueen Memorial Scholarship Fund, OCAD University, Development Office, 100 McCaul St., Toronto, Ont., M5T 1W1.

A few years ago, when my daughter was getting married, I looked everywhere for a dress but couldn’t find one. Finally I went to Zoe, a Toronto dress designer who had made dresses for me before. She brought out a long dress that I thought it was too fancy. The wedding was going to be simple, and I didn’t want to be too dressy. I could tell that my husband, Burle, liked the way it looked on me but I didn’t have the nerve to get it.

At the time, I walked regularly with a friend. Dorothy was about the same height as me but a far more flamboyant dresser. She wore the most fantastic clothes with bracelets up to her elbows. She told me once that she thought of dressing as theatre, wearing a costume, and how much she loved doing that.

I said to myself, “If I were Dorothy, I’d get that dress.” So I did.

It had a square neckline and a drop waist. The material was semi-transparent, like a chiffon with a tight, striped bodice and polka-dot sleeves and skirt. It was simple and elegant.

After the ceremony, everyone gathered at our house for dinner in the garden. We had a tent and food stations and speeches. In the midst of it all, it rained. Everyone took cover, but some of the children ran out into the rain and danced until the sun broke through and shone again.

My brother said it looked like The Great Gatsby. Everything was beautiful. Especially my dress.

All because of Dorothy.

Louise Yolles, Toronto, Ontario

When I was a newly engaged 21-year-old, I received an offer from my fiance’s mother. She wanted to know if I would like to wear the family wedding dress. This dress had been made for Michael’s grandmother who was married in 1906. Since then it had been worn by his mother, several of his aunts and his sister. Now, it was being offered to me.

I wore it with pride and joy. It is a magic dress because it seems to fit most body types in a way that makes one feel that it was meant to be. The bodice isn’t fitted, but as the dress drapes, it forms itself to the waist and hips, pooling more or less on the floor, depending on the bride’s height. Made of Brussels lace, the silk underlay has been replaced, but it fit me like a glove and I was able to wear my own grandmother’s lace veil with a pearl-studded pill-box hat that my sister-in-law had worn with the same dress a few years earlier.

My husband and I have had an extraordinarily happy marriage and we always say that the dress is magical because no one who has ever worn it has had a failed marriage.

But I think it was the value system underlying the dress that makes it such a lucky charm. I was a young girl, eager to have the wedding of my dreams, but smart enough to recognize the olive branch that was being handed to me – a gesture that said we are taking you in to be a part of our family for ever and ever.

Twenty-seven years later, my daughter Jane became engaged and of course wanted to wear the dress. Jane looked like an angel on her wedding day. Although she was slimmer and taller than I, it still fit her like it was made for her.

One of my nephews asked for the dress for his bride some years later. I gladly handed it over. Some weeks after the wedding I remembered them coming to our house to deliver the dress back to me, but I had no recollection of actually seeing it. I began to look for it when I was in a closet or down in the basement, wondering where it might be. I was afraid to mention it to my husband so I just quietly went about trying to find it myself. I worried that it had been returned in a green garbage bag and had been thrown out or sent to Goodwill.

My mother-in-law was living with us by this time and I was frantic she would ask me one day where the dress was. Finally, I confronted my husband with the news. I had lost the dress! He was dumbfounded. After thinking for a few minutes, he said he would tell his mother it was his fault. He knew she would forgive him.

That same day, my husband came upstairs from the basement with a file box. He had a funny smirk on his face and I knew he had found the dress. Sure enough, rolled up in a sheet, the dress was safely tucked inside.

What joy and relief I felt knowing the dress was safe. The thread that sews the generations together will continue to hold. My granddaughters will continue to connect the dots linking them to their past when they try on the dress and discover that this wonderful dress was made for them as well as their great-grandmother.

I have another daughter to marry. She has a wonderful guy who will make her very happy and although she hasn’t tried on the dress yet, I know it will fit her just like it was made for her. It’s that kind of dress – it’s magical.

Rosemary Edwards, Toronto, Ont.

One of my favorite dresses was actually a wool suit, circa 1966. I had just graduated from nursing school, had just moved to Toronto, had my first real job, my first apartment, and my first real paycheque. I was finally grown-up and independent. It felt good, but scary.

My suit was made for me by a dress-maker. It was a Vogue pattern. There is something special about an outfit made just for you. There’s the fittings and seeing it take shape. The skirt had two front seams with hidden pockets and was above my knees, which was the style then. There were two little tucks along the waistband that kept it a little loose in the front, but the back was fitted, with darts. The jacket fell to just below the waist and was shaped to skim the body. It had two front seams to match the skirt as well as beautiful, carved wooden buttons.

The best part, though, was the fabric. That was what I loved so much about it. It was a small, discreet hound’s tooth check of pale blue and chocolate brown. The wool was soft to touch, and smooth. It hung so nicely when worn. I wore it with a pale blue turtleneck and, of course, dark brown leather shoes. Every time I wore it, it felt comfortable and I felt so nicely dressed. I could wear that suit anywhere. I think I did. I remember wearing it to a function at Hart House. I don’t remember the function, but I do remember the room, all that gleaming wood and the atmosphere of intellect. I also remember my escort, a very nice medical student. I loved that suit and that year in Toronto. It was a special time.

Charlotte Owen, Newmarket, Ontario

My favourite dress is a full-length shimmering sheath with (ahem) a long slit up the side and covered in gold sequins: a glowing reflection of my love for music. I first wore it 18 years ago when I performed for the first time with a symphony orchestra: The Hamilton Philharmonic at Hamilton Place. I was petrified, but the dress sparkled and carried me through!

Since its inaugural performance, my dress has seen many stages including Massey Hall and has glowed before 4,000 at Mel Lastman square when I had the honour to work with the great Peter Appleyard and his Swing Fever Big Band.

During the past year or so it has graced stages in Victoria, the Annual Ball at RMC in Kingston, the Old Mill in Toronto, as well as a special tribute evening to songwriter and Toronto Symphony trumpet virtuoso Johnny Cowell. The dress even got to go out on New’s Year Eve to the Royal Canadian Military Institute for its gala celebration.

You might think I’d be getting tired of this dress but the opposite is true.  It glimmers with such wonderful musical memories. I hope I never outgrow it!

Priscilla Wright, Toronto, Ont.

I was always more of a skirt and blouse person. My favourite skirt was my Black Watch tartan, our grandfather’s regiment.

Still, two dresses come to mind. The first was the dress I wore to my trousseau tea before I was married. It was deep pink with a shawl collar and full skirt trimmed with navy blue lace. In those days, you had what was called a hope chest. You put in it things like cups and saucers, dishes, bedding and gifts people gave you. I also had a lot of my mother’s dishes and keepsakes. On the day of the tea you put all these things on display so your guests could see what you saved through the years. 

The other dress also involved a wedding. In 1983 we went to Durham, England, on an exchange. The people we stayed with invited us to a wedding in 1985 and I wore an off-white dress with beige trim. It was the most expensive dress I ever bought, but every time I put it on I felt really dressed up.

The wedding was quite different from the way we do it here. The flower girls go down ahead of the bride and her father and mother and then the bridesmaids follow them. After the wedding all of the invited guests gather around the bride and groom and the wedding party for pictures.

Barbara Thompson, Durham, Ontario

I bought my favorite dress on my birthday, July 15, 1977, in a chic town tucked along the Costa Esmeralda. I was traveling around Sardinia with some wonderful women, living on $20 a day, wandering back roads in search of cheap hotels with baths and no bugs. We went to the beach almost every day, and I could never resist a chance to prowl through another ruined fort or castle, or stumble into a cave, or clamber around an ancient pile of rocks. But, on my birthday, we meandered into Porto Cervo to window shop.

Everything was beyond my price range. And then I saw the dress. It was mauve, in a deliciously filmy cotton, and it could slip off the shoulders. It swirled when I walked. I loved it. So I bought it. Anyway. My hair was to my waist. That afternoon, after the beach, I braided it into small braids, and then undid it when it dried so it eddied around my face.

I wore the dress for a magical birthday dinner at a table under a grape arbor at a Sardinian restaurant. The evening was so warm. We laughed. We toasted. I had the wit to avoid the grappa. And I felt pretty.

The dress was a character at that birthday party. Although I wore it again, it never felt the same. It was magic.

Mary Janigan, Toronto

Over the years one dress has sprung into my memory many times. I bought it in 1962 for my trousseau (an old-fashioned word!). It was a sundress, made of cotton, in the most magnificent colours – no particular design but flowing into each other in splashes of hot pink, red, blue-pink (purple) and gold. The waist was slender, the skirt gently flared, the back low, the front in a V. Maybe it was the sheen of the cotton, the daring design, the strong impressive colours, but I felt attractive, empowered and happy wearing it.

I remember on our honeymoon in Nassau, on a hot July evening, walking on the beach carrying my shoes (probably hot pink sandals), and wearing the sundress. Tom and I were returning from having dinner at a nearby hotel and playfully enjoying the beautiful setting.

I also recall wearing this dress to a garden dinner-dance in our honour before the wedding. The hostess was so impressed with the dress that she gave me a magnificent silk stole in hot pink – it matched perfectly. She had had it and never used it.

Why have I remembered that dress? Maybe it was because it was part of a new life for me. Or, as a shy, quiet girl I was wanting to show that I could be strong and successful – part of my road to maturing. Whatever the reason, it is good to look back and appreciate it all.

Theda Deacon Toronto, Ontario

I have a kept a dress for more than forty years, it has travelled across the Atlantic with me, survived all our moves and even the ransacking of my cupboard by my girls in search for “something different.”

Of itself, it is not so spectacular. My wedding dress, my ball gowns from the 80s are all much more flamboyant. But this dress I wore to a garden party at Buckingham Palace which I attended with my parents in 1965. Thus it has become a tangible relic of my childhood, of life in England, of the prime of my parents, of a beautiful day in a palace garden – a different life and world.

It is a knee-length peach silk/linen mix, fitted, sleeveless with a boat neck in front, low square neck in the back. There are two rows of applique embroidery of large stylized flowers and leaves in the same fabric down the front. I wore a pale blue silk coat over it. This was also my dress for summer parties and weddings (always held in the afternoon then) that year, and no doubt for the next few years, too!

Frances Price, Toronto, Ontario