Since Michael uses actual lace textiles to embellish his one-of-a-kind pieces, why not use lace from his mother’s circa 1957 wedding gown on a surprise gift? Without revealing details, Michael asked his mother to ship him her wedding gown and it arrived still in its original box from Selman’s of Louisville, Kentucky.  

“I had an idea what he was up to,” Mrs. Hofman said when I phoned her in South Bend, Indiana, “and it was something I wanted him to do! Michael’s work makes such lovely gifts of remembrance, so when I saw how beautiful the vase was that he made for us, I was delighted!” 

Michael also used hand croqueted lace from a tablecloth made by his father’s stepmother to decorate a platter for his parents, as well as for his brothers, to commemorate the anniversary. The wonderful bit of serendipity was that his grandmother was from Belgium and had made the tablecloth for Michael’s parents’ wedding present. 

“By using porcelain, which is a special type of clay, I am able to craft pieces with a defined elegance of thinness and lightness but still have a profound structural integrity,” Michael explained about his work.  

Although Joan Hofman’s wedding gown had been preserved for 50 years, textiles don’t tend to last forever and you can’t keep a wedding gown on the shelf to admire! But a lovingly crafted piece of porcelain imprinted with its textured remembrance is another story. 

When I asked Mrs. Hofman about her wedding day in 1957, she remembered that it was unusually cold for November. “I shopped around all the fashionable stores in Louisville and found a dress at Selman’s that suited me well. Although it was short, in the ballerina length that was the style of the day, I was otherwise ‘covered’—not like the brides now!” 

Michael Hofman told me a bit about how his parents had met and his mother filled me in. The story goes that when Emil Hofman was on holiday with friends from graduate school at the University of Notre Dame, he was in an automobile accident outside of Louisville and Joan Sherron was a student nurse at the hospital. “We were forbidden to socialize with the patients, but I guess we got around that,” Mrs. Hofman told me. She added: “Under the circumstances, my husband thought Allstate should pay for the wedding!”