Wedding Dress shopping... I'm excited; however, there is a show called, Say Yes to Dress, it seemed to be such a long and painful process, some brides had lots of drama as well. But what girl wouldn't be excited about choosing a wedding dress. It's sort of the once in a life time chance that you get to really dress up like Cinderelle, going to an amazing party, and dance with your prince charming. It even gets better because you don't need to lose a shoe for the Prince to find you and marry you. He marries you right there at the party. You enter last and make a big entrance. :-) OK I feel weird to say that it's a once in a life time opportunity, I've done it once but again, it's totally different this time because we are planning everything ourselves, and we take the time to plan. Oh, back to the dress...
My wedding dress hunting crew consists of my two daughters and their friend Katie. I browsed around and found JCrew bridial. Their dresses are plain and simple, it's my kind of style. So I made an appointment with them. Then I thought I would go to a more traditional bridal shop as well, so I made an appointment with Amanda's Bridal Boutique just 5 minutes from my house in downtown Redmond.
On Friday, we went to JCrew. They were nice dresses but for some reason, none of the dresses I tried on wow me. I know the rule of thumb is, I need to "love" the dress. They were very simple and cute but I looked at myself after putting them on, I didn't feel like I was getting married. There was one that had potential but they only had 4 left that's my size. By the time I made up my mind, it's probably already all gone anyway. They measured me and told me I'm a 2 or 0, I am not a 0, they don't do alteration there, I started to worry about the fit as well. I was thinking that maybe we'll be going to 10 bridal places before I could find something.
On Sat, we went to Amanda's Bridal. I didn't have high hopes. I thought that maybe they have gowns only for big huge church wedding, like princess Diana's 12 feet in diameter gown or something like that. Anyway, we walked in there, it's a very small shop. The sales lady told us to look for dresses that we might like, and she would hang them up outside my dressing room for me. We started looking, and many of them had too much beading and laces, and they just seemed so huge and heavy, I thought, oh no, this certainly was not my thing. But we decided to split up into two teams, Dannah and I, Jesse and Katie, then we started going through the mountain of dresses. The girls had pretty good eyes, they started finding dresses that had more slender skirts. We ended up with about 9 dresses. One of them looks like a Cinderelle dress, I didn't want it but the girls insisted that I needed to try it on so I complied. :-)
There was no mirror in the dressing room which made me nervous because I didn't even know the dress look on me. How if it looked reallly ugly on and the girls would laugh at me. :-( The first dress I put on had lots of beading on the bodice and a more simple skirt. I walked out of the room, I saw smiles on the girls' face, then it was a "wow". I stepped on the platform in front of the 3 way mirror, I smiled. I thought I looked like a fairy tale princess. So we put that as a definite candidate. I then put on the others, we liked every single one of them except for the 2 mermaid dresses. Though they looked good enough on me, they were not as comfortable because the fit was tight from waist down. So we eliminated the 2 mermaid dresses, I still had 7 to choose from. I knew we were in trouble, they all looked good on me. Jesse said, "Mom, they all work, you need to get one that you absolutely love." Then the other girls said, you need to find one you can imagine yourself getting married in. There was one with beautiful laces, I put it on, I think I wowed myself but then another customer in the store said to me, "That's the best dress ever, I put it on and that was it." I thought, great, I'm not going to pick this one now. I'm sure many brides pick same dresses all the time but with somebody right there telling you the dress is her dress as well, it's a bit weird.
After closing my eyes, imagining at our wedding, wearing my wedding dress walking toward Rob and his smiling at me, I had two dresses in mind. So I put the two dresses back on again. It's the first dress I put on and another one. I picked the other one. The whole process was a lot less painless than I imagined. The only problem was that I had too many good choices, I guess that was a good problem to have. I put the deposit down, it's not a pricy dress, and it's going to arrive in Feb. The shop will do all the alterations, and it's going to fit me perfectly. :-)
I'm just so thankful to have Jesse, Dannah, and Katie helping me out. They were very honest to me, I definitely have a winning dress shopping team. Big thanks to you team. :-)
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