One Year Ago!

A year ago today I found my wedding dress. If you'd like to read the story again click the link below! It is the most-read story on the blog!

First Fitting

I had my first dress fitting nearly a week ago on the 30th. I just took my momma cuz' no one can see my dress now! That's also why I have no pictures!

Long story short: I'm pissed at Nebraska Bridal Outlet!!!
When I tried on my dress back in November I was minimally stressed (compared to NOW! lol!) and at a healthy weight. Since the 2-month point my body has been letting me know it is past the stress threshold that keeps me healthy: I dropped 10% of my body weight.
I'm not happy about it, but my hair isn't falling out; so I'll increase my butter/fats intake, stay calm and hopefully it won't fall out at all.
Basically when I ordered the dress, the ladies told me I should buy the size I tried on. It fit "well enough" and they'd "seen brides balloon with stress 100 times." I insisted on ordering the correct size only to be shot down because my "hips are large."
I shut up, partially appalled, and they ordered the damn big dress. Now a dress that fit me off the rack is no longer; I have to have side seams taken in as well as the pre-planned alterations. After a few stress-sighs and innappropriate mutterings about the outlet, the alteration lady (who is brilliance) said "Well, this is the dress that you have. Let's just fix it."



In the words of Tim Gunn, "MAKE IT WORK!"

 So we did.
She's taking it in on the sides so I can actually look like I have a lace up dress. Currently when laced as tight as possible, it's loose as hell and looks like a tiny braid down my back.
She's also hemming the front walkway to echo the style of a hi/lo hem dress that I dreamed of since I started looking at bridal gowns.
The doily bunnies I made look simply stunning on the train. I can't wait to show you. She's also making a bustle that helps to showcase the bunnies. It's AH-MAZING.

Can't wait to update you all... in the meantime, did you check out my Weddzilla?

Colored Wedding Dress Crinolines + Part 1: DIY Colored Crinoline

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My favorite thing to see on wedding blogs (besides chuppahs!) is a bride with a colored crinoline. Some brides are women who wanted a colored dress but for whatever reason ended up with a white one. The colored crinoline is a way to wear a pop of the color in a fun way.
I originally wanted a yellow / green dress. Yellow is just my color!

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We all know I ended up with a (most beautiful) ivory dress so I immediately wanted to adopt this detail into my own style for the Day. Problem is... finding these is no easy task!
When searching you are faced with 3 options: Have a short dress, pay the price or buy a white one to dye! Having a short dress is by far the easiest option. There's no shortage of pettiskirts and square dancing petticoats the perfect length! Here's one superb website I found. 

Swank Underpinnings

Good old etsy has a few shops that cater to the colored-crinoline bride. The prices aren't too* bad but $0 is my budget, sooo...! One excellent shop is Swank Underpinnings. They range between $35 to $225 (custom orders!). They make them in all lengths, which is really not easy to find. Some of her custom stuff--swoon!
Loca Loves Pirate has some cutie pastel babies, too. They're even full length!

So what's a budget-spent bride to do?! It involved massive preparation research, scissors, and blind faith. A couple weekends ago when I was making our invitations, I asked my mom to enlist in helping me cut my crinoline out of my dress. With scissors. She surprisingly did not look at me like I was too crazy, but we both felt aprehensive about the whole thing. If I had thought about it much more, I wouldn't have done it.

Steps

1. Put on your dress.
2. Have a helper pull up the top layer(s) so that you can only see the crinoline layer.
3. Make a guide snip at waist-height where you'll be cutting accross the crinoline.
4. Take off the dress.
5. Lay out the dress on the bed and pull all the layers up over the top of the dress, making sure the only layer exposed is the crinoline layer.
6. Just like with cutoff shorts, find your guide snip. Now read: DO NOT CUT THROUGH BOTH LAYERS. ONE LAYER AT A TIME ONLY.
7. Just like with cut off shorts, cut in a straight line across the front.
8. Flip the dress over. You'll see why you don't cut through both layers.
9. The back of a wedding dress is almost always where it zips, laces, yada yadas... and there will be a panel back there you don't want to cut that separates the dress closure from your bare skin. So taking care to cut AROUND that part, Cut straight across the back, around the panel and back straight across to finish.
10. Pull out your crinoline, hang your dress back up and committ yourself. Not to your fiance(e)... To an asylum. You're officially NUTS for doing this DIY.

The second part of the DIY is dying and the third is adding an elastic waistband so you can wear it under your dress. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3!
In the meantime, there is a whole SECTION of Offbeat Bride that features just weddings with colored-crinoline brides. Enjoy!

Dress!

Before I go posting pictures and posts all willy nilly about accessories, I want to share a little about my dress.
I had wanted a non-white wedding dress when I first started thinking about getting my wedding gown. I wasn't sure whether I wanted yellow or purple but I found some Vera Wangs that got me in the mindset.

By the time I had stressed out so much about the price of the Vera Wangs I realized it would never happen. I did find a company online that specializes in replicas that are about 10% of the price of an original so I emailed them. They seemed legit and I talked to some other online brides who had used them, but the handpainting on the green "Didi" Vera Wang just wouldn't be the same on the replica.

I had dreams about the wedding but never saw my dress. Some of my Offbeat Bride Tribe-sisters told me they had dreams about theirs and they paid attention to the details and used them in their actual wedding. One night I had a dream I was climbing the stairs in my venue into the reception area and I had a lucid moment during the dream where I looked down at my dress and saw the top in great detail. I also saw that it was a shade of white so I disregarded it.

My mother said we would go shopping and just see what was out there so I agreed. I went once by myself to try one in every silhouette without a biased opinion (a positive bias, but biased nonetheless). I went once with my fiance to show him one I ended up hating in the end. Then I went to the Nebraska Bridal Outlet. People--- seriously. I'd heard from one bride who is smaller than me and one who is larger and they both got a dress there. Now this I had to see. It is a 45 minute drive into the bleak rural area West of Omaha to a place called Wahoo.

I walked in with my father, mother and fiance. They let my mom bring her dog in her pup stroller! As always, the HiLLjO-sized section looked bleak. I grabbed one out of that then went to a rack of my-size samples they had just gotten from a show. We tried on a bunch, some were pretty and some we didn't bother zipping. A couple of girls had found their dresses already since I had come into the store and they were shrieking their delight for the whole salon to hear. I looked at my mom with tears in my eyes "Mommy, I want my wedding dress." She hugged me, said "We'll get it. Let's go get that broad out there," and out we went again. I told her I was looking for a lightweight trumpet style and she took me over to the sample rack. She described one I had in the room and had no luck with. I sighed and threw my head back in exasperation.
Would I have to make it?

When I looked back down I saw a gown sticking out of the regular rack within the average sizes that someone failed to shuffle back into place. You know when you're trying wedding dresses on and they tell you it looks different on the rack than on you? Well I hoped it wasn't true with this little number because I loved it from inside its plastic bag before trying it on. We took it to the room and my mother and I wanted to lace it up in order to kill time and to see what it really looked like. As I was gettin sinched I started to look at the top.

All be damned if two things didn't happen:
1)I understand what deja vu is and 2)I cried. Deja vu is where you dream about something happening and then it happens when you're awake. The feeling is the remembering. This dress I remembered... from my dream! I told my mom "I know this is the one. I'm crying. I only want to see it all at once." I stopped looking even though I already knew and she finished the tying so we walked out to show our guys. I couldn't stop smiling the dress even felt good on. My dad says "She likes this one, look at her face," to Shawn. I got in front of the mirror and the magic happened.

We all stopped. We knew.

I'm not posting up what I look like in the dress but this is the manufacturer's picture of it.

Note that it will be much different looking when I am done with it. So this is my wedding dress story. I wish everyone would share theirs.