So last Saturday Heather and I went to a dress sort for EAG. It was basically what it sounded like - we sorted through dresses. LOTS of dresses. After a trip down the freeway to a storage facility in Bloomington, we go up to the second floor, walk through a few hallways of storage spaces that seems like it could be in a horror movie, before we turn the corner and are greeted by a splash of color. BAM!! There was no mistaking that we were in the right place. There were dresses of every size and color. There was glitter. There was food (including cookies). And there were women sorting through everything.
Our first objective was very simple. We had to first commandeer a rack of dresses, and then look at each dress individually, checking for damage and out-of-date styles. Heather's rack was full of black dresses, some of which included velvet, which got tossed in the Goodwill box right away. For the most part she had a lot of keepers. Me, on the other hand...I got the rack filled with dresses of this pale lavender color. While only a few were damaged, the main issue was style. I think that Lavender is officially the color of prom in the 90's. Once all of the fashion crimes were sorted through and taken out, it was fairly easy to go on to the next step.
The next step was to order the dresses according to size. Sounds fairly simple, right? Not necessarily. If all of the dresses had the typical numerical numbering system on their tags, this would be so easy. The trouble comes in where one has to figure out what "size" a "medium" is, and whether or not it is bigger or smaller than another "medium." Heather and I had fun with this. It was pretty much a guessing game.
Once that was all done, Step 3 was to sort ALL of the dresses by size. This was where the mass chaos happened, as there was about 30 women walking around in a small hallway with an armful of dresses trying to get their dresses on the correct racks - it was quite challenging. It was probably the longest part of the whole process. After the madness ended (and about half of the volunteers left) the last part left to do was to sort the dresses by color. Heather and I were in charge of the size 10 dresses. It took us a while to sort them according to rainbow order, as we had to do A LOT of dress shuffling. It was also kinda confusing to determine what color some dresses were (for example, what does one do with a dress that looks pink at one angle, but orange from another? Or what does one do with that stupid lavender color? is it purple or blue?) After that, it was kind of like everyone took a breath cause it was FINALLY DONE - an hour and a half ahead of schedule, too. Heather and I grabbed some cookies and made our way back through the creepy hallways and left the storage facility. On the way home we proceeded to have an amazing adventure at Ikea, the Magical Wonderland of Home Furnishings. But that's another story for another time, :)
Overall, I feel like the dress sort went really well. I got to meet the other board members. They were all fairly young women and come from all walks of life - on is currently getting her degree in fashion merchandising, one works for WCCO, and Maggie (the president) is a mom of 3 who's doing her master's thesis on the impact of service learning (boy, I lucked out with that one, didn't I?) This makes me even more excited to continue working with EAG as the sping boutique looms ever closer...
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