Wedding Veils

 The Kennedy Brides

When I was a teenager, I found a lovely maroon leather journal with empty pages at a thrift store that my mother took us kids to. I think I paid about .50¢ for it and I already had plans for what I was going to put inside. Brides. My hometown newspaper had a lovely bridal section where the brides photos were place in a row (just like the Kennedy ladies above) with their newly married last name; Mrs. John Doe, Mrs. Thomas Jones...etc. It was my favorite past-time to cut out the large squares of beautiful bride portraits and paste them in my journal. 

Brides from the seventies and early eighties had such lovely gowns and most of all, the most astounding wedding veils. I was obessesed with wedding veils. Long, short, waist length, it didn't matter what the length it was as long as the top was extraordinarily beautiful. Three years of devoted clipping, I wound up with a full journal of brides from Lubbock. Some of the brides were my high school friends or my friends from my neighborhood. There was nothing more beautiful than seeing a pretty young bride with a voluminousness veil of white, delicately studded with pearls, sequin and flower appliqués dangling as if catching a bit of air to make them mobile. I'd like to think that I started my first homemade Pinterest board! 

By the time I got married in 1994, I had stopped clipping photos thirteen years before. I still loved looking at my bride journal and from time to time would hear that some of the lovely brides were divorcing. Sad, but that's life. 

When my husband and I moved from Lubbock to San Antonio in 2003, I tossed it away. I can't explain why I did that. I think I was in a cleaning beast mode. I regret it of course but I can recall the memories I have of those clippings. 

One day, about ten months ago, I was thrift store shopping at Gramma's Attic and it was getting close to Halloween day and I wanted to see if I could find some costumes with angel wings. I needed as many pairs of fairy and angel wings that I could find for my photography business. I was lucky and struck gold when I found four different wings. Two butterfly-like ones and two angel wings. As I entered another aisle, a Hefty ziplock bag caught my attention. I opened it up because I could see there was some delicate looking tulle in there. It was a wedding veil. I bought it and the wings and now the veil sits in my guest room. It has an abundance of pearls and little dangling flower buds. White satin rosettes form a little tiara-like effect and the body of the veil is interspersed with beautiful little cabochon pearls. I wonder to whom that veil once belonged to. I'll never know but I'm sure that she once had a beautiful portrait taken of her in her wedding finery and that her veil was her crowning touch. Every once in a while, I try it on and think about her and what she thought when she first put in on for her wedding day. It's in good hands. I like being its guardian.

My thrift store wedding veil find