Wedding Dress Made from a Parachute

Girls, I brought a story to the forum that will inspire any seamstress 😍 Enjoy )))

A wedding is an event that should be special for any couple. But for Ruth and Claude the most important thing at the ceremony was the wedding dress. It was sewn from a real parachute that the groom brought back from World War II.

In 1944 American pilot Claude Hensinger was returning after another raid on Japan when his plane was hit at dusk. Fortunately, he managed to bail out. He made a hard landing on the rocks in his parachute, suffering only minor injuries. There was nobody around, and Claude had no choice but to spend the night right there. The night was cold, and his parachute came in handy again: the pilot used it as a pillow and a blanket. The next morning Claude was rescued by the allies.

After the war he returned home, taking with him his main war trophy: the parachute that had saved his life and kept him from freezing.

Back home he began dating a girl named Ruth, whom he had known since childhood. A year later the pilot proposed to his beloved. But instead of a ring she received that very parachute that had saved Claude's life. The pilot asked Ruth to make a wedding dress out of it.

“He saved my life. I want you to make a wedding dress out of it,” said Claude.

At first Ruth was shocked: make a dress out of a huge nylon parachute?! But then she remembered how Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind sewed a dress out of a curtain, and decided that nothing was impossible.

Ruth hired a seamstress, who made the bodice and the veil. The bride sewed the skirt herself. She kept to tradition and did not show Claude the result until the wedding, so he didn’t know what his parachute had been transformed into. But according to Ruth, he was extremely pleased with the result.

The parachute dress became their family heirloom. Twenty-five years later their daughter married wearing it, and after that it passed to their daughter-in-law.

In the early '90s Ruth learned that the Smithsonian Institution was looking for artifacts made from World War II parachutes. It was time to make the family's dress a national treasure.

Now it can be seen at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution.