Mariah Herron was frustrated because, like many girls, she couldn’t find find the right prom dress. Her prerequisites: affordable and made of camouflage fabric.
Mariah wanted to go to her Junior Prom at Marshfield High School in Wisconsin dressed in something that reflected her love of hunting and working with her hands. So dad came to the rescue.
“We looked online and everything was so expensive. So I suggested that we go to a fabric store to look at patterns,” said David Herron, Mariah’s father. “At that point, I wasn’t thinking that I would sew the dress; I just figured we knew a few people who could if we asked them to.”
But he did make the dress for her, completely from scratch and with only a cursory knowledge of sewing from his time in the military, when he would sew his stripes and hem his own uniforms. With $97 in fabric and six weeks of sewing while his wife and daughter bit their nails nervously (“My wife would periodically ask, ‘Do you need help? We should probably call a professional’ but I’m a perfectionist and wanted to do it myself”), Herron put together the perfect prom dress for his daughter.
Made of a large Snow White camo print with an overlay of black tulle and a black satin bow in the back, the dress’ finishing touch was shotgun casings in place of the flowers that the pattern called for. “He bought me boots to wear with it,” Mariah said happily. She was so happy with the outcome that she asked him to make her wedding dress.
“We’ll see,” Herron said with a smile.
Video: Liz Welter/News-Herald Media
That dress came out great. Props to everyone involved.