Plain Dress! part 1

Plain dress is practical!

        Plain dress is relatively easy to achieve and should be practical too. But simple dress does not mean shabby or shoddy. Plain and simple dress is more about reducing the time we waste on clothing maintenance, laundering, and coordination.

       
  Plain dress in the form of woven materials are thin and dry quickly. Woven button shirts and dresses are our clothing of choice. Our family uses a clothes line year round. In the winter, clothes can take several hours to dry, but woven shirts and dresses can be hung on hangers and dried fairly quickly. This reduces space used up on my clothes line for undergarments, diapers, blankets, etc. Dark clothes or dark patterns don't seem to stain as noticeably either.

            When we need to find new shirts we find a lot at Goodwill. Years ago when I first met Daniel I found it a little shocking to see him dehorning calves in designer men's shirts. But Daniel, being raised in his isolated Mennonite community was unaware of clothing status symbols and picked clothes at Goodwill based on their functionality. This resulted in Ralph Lauren shirts splattered in manure and cow snot. The irony of this always gets to me. (Laugh!) But the rule remains the same. It is not about fashion. It is about practicality and Ralph Lauren costs the same at Goodwill as any other brand.                                                                                      

      Consignment stores are good options too. Sometimes I make the little boy's shirts because they are harder to find. But they are really quite simple to sew.

         Polyester blend clothing, while hot in the summer, is very durable and easy to find at a good price. The boys and men in our family enjoy Dickie's, or similar types of pants, because they stand up to the rigors of rough play and daily chores. I love them because they dry quickly on the clothesline in the winter. They are also the only pants that survive one boy to be passed down to another. They also repair easily as they do not fray as much and the cloth is thinner and easier to work with on the sewing machine.

         The Lord has provided my husband these through various avenues. One time a uniform company liquidated its old uniforms. Another time a friend donated his uniforms after leaving a job that required them. Suspenders allow him to wear pants that would ordinarily be too large for him because they hang from the shoulders rather than bunched by a belt at the waist. He wears the newer pairs to town and Friend's meetings and reserves the older ones for chores. As they age and he gets new pairs he rotates the town ones into his chore clothes and wears newer pants to town, etc. His pants last many, many years.

       Black socks match most things and last longer in rotation than white ones. I hate pulling one brown sock and one white sock out of the laundry when theoretically they should match!        

        Jeans get holes in the knees, and around the pockets. Repairing them is time consuming, but we will gladly wear a pair on it's last leg if there is still a little life left in them. When others share their children's outgrown pairs that won't make the Goodwill cut, we gladly receive them. Waste not, want not! 

     I have found that knit fabrics stretch around the neck when hung on hangers and are not as quick to dry. We keep a few of these around as undershirts or play clothes for the little ones, but we don't actively seek these out.

         These are basic guidelines we follow. They are not laws and sometimes we wear things that do not fall under these guidelines. Clothes are not our religion or highest priority. Serving God and our neighbor is and if something else is more appropriate to fulfill those priorities than so be it! Many blessings!