09/14/2026
This was my first year participating in Same Dress Spokane, and I’m so excited to finally share what I created. 🧡
If you aren’t familiar with the project, Same Dress Spokane brings local photographers together around one dress, each of us creating something completely different with it, and keeping it a secret even from each other until today! This project is about creativity, community, and raising awareness and donations for an incredible local organization.
This year, that organization is The Hope House Respite Center.
And once I heard that, I couldn’t stop thinking about one word:
HOPE.
When I started planning what I wanted to create with the dress, I kept trying to come up with something more elaborate. More unexpected. More artsy. But this one idea kept coming back to me, and eventually I realized I needed to stop trying to talk myself out of it.
I ultimately wanted to create an image that represented hope.
I immediately thought of my sister, whose own life story is such a beautiful example of hope and resilience. She pregnant at the time, and I could already picture her in this incredible bright orange dress, standing against the landscape left behind by the Gray Fire here in Medical Lake.
It’s been three years since fire tore through our little town. Things are still far from completely rebuilt or back to the way they were, and the scars are everywhere.
But so is life.
Greenery has pushed its way back through the burned landscape. Wildflowers grow among charred trees. Homes are being rebuilt. New life exists right alongside the evidence of everything that was lost.
And standing in the middle of all of it was my sister, carrying new life of her own.
I don’t think there could have been a more fitting representation of hope.
And maybe hope and resilience aren’t really that different. Because hope isn’t always bright and untouched and beautiful. Sometimes it grows out of places that have been burned. Sometimes it exists alongside grief and devastation. Sometimes it’s simply believing that something new can still grow from what remains.
Creating these also turned into a little family adventure, My husband came along to help, my son helped, and my sister’s son helped too. We packed everyone up and headed out into the burned areas together, and the kids even became part of our little crew—which you’ll see in some of the behind-the-scenes photos.
We also had a pretty small window to pull this off. The weather was questionable, daylight was disappearing, the mosquitoes were absolutely relentless 😂, and my very pregnant model understandably wasn’t going to be hiking around burned-out fields with me all evening.
I knew I didn’t need a hundred photographs.
I just needed the one.
And I’m so grateful we made it happen when we did, because there wasn’t going to be another chance with this dress. Plus my sister had her baby girl shortly after my week with the dress ended.
What I couldn’t have known when we created these photographs back in July, was that shortly afterward, more devastating fires would affect families in the Spokane area.
When we were standing out there that evening, we were looking back at what our own little community had been through three years earlier. I never imagined that before I even shared these photographs, other families so close to us would suddenly find themselves at the beginning of that same long road.
Our hearts ache for everyone who has been affected.
We know rebuilding doesn’t happen overnight. We know the landscape doesn’t simply go back to the way it was. We know there are things that can never truly be replaced.
But three years later, I can also tell you this:
Life comes back.
Green pushes through the blackened ground.
Flowers grow.
Families rebuild.
Communities come together and keep going.
There is still beauty after devastation.
There is resilience.
There is community coming together to help one another.
And there is HOPE.
I’ll be sharing a few more images from our shoot later today.
Most importantly, if you’d like to support Hope House, you can donate through Volunteers of America here:
https://voaspokane.org/same-dress-spokane/
I’m so grateful I got to be a small part of Same Dress Spokane this year—and that this crazy orange dress gave our family an evening together that ended up meaning so much more to me than I expected. 🧡
And if you’d like to see all of the Same Dress Spokane images in person, they’ll be on display at Brick West Brewing, October 2nd.
