At the Sweetwater Women’s Club June tea, members were supposed to wear something that either reflected the Fourth of July or attire that one would wear to a tea such as a hat and pearls.
Betsy Stewart, who was celebrating her 25th year as a club member at that meeting, had nothing in her current wardrobe that fit in with the month’s dress attire.
Stewart—in almost an act of desperation in finding something to wear—reached in her closet and found a red, white and blue theme dressed that she made in 1953 in her 8th grade home economics class at Shelton Junior High School in Shelton, Washington.
“I haven’t worn that dress in a very long time,” she said. “It was a good opportunity to wear it and I got so many compliments out of it.”
At the tea, the Sweetwater Women’s Club recognized Stewart’s 25th years of club membership. The women brought her up to the stage and presented her with a pin and flowers.
They then asked about the dress.
The dress, made out of polyester fabric, has as a sailor collar, trimming of red and blue trimming around the edges of the collar and around the bottom of the dress.
With the dress, she had also made a red, white and blue belt and a navy blue jacket out of the same polyester material used for the dress. Coincidentally, she said at the time she was not trying to create a patriotic themed dressed.
She said that she just liked the red, white and blue color scheme and wanted to use those colors. She said her home economics teacher just told them that they needed to make some kind of wearable clothing and that’s what she put together.
When she put it on, Stewart said she was amazed that the dress she made in junior high school still fits her 65 years later.
“It fits a little bit loose,” she said.
The last time she wore the dress was when she was a teenager.
Stewart had held on to her dress for decades, never getting rid of it because of its sentimental worth.
“It’s just been hanging in the closet and moving with me whenever I had moved” she said.
That included when she moved from Shelton, Washington to Norwalk, California and to Chula Vista, where she has lived for more than 25 years.
Through her home economics class, she said she learned the valuable skill of sewing clothes. She said when she was younger she would often sew her own clothes.
But now with three kids, 10 grandkids and two great-grand kids it was just easier to buy clothes instead of making them.
