Shash @ Shasher’s Life is having a Wedding Dress Blog Tour.
This is the back and train of my wedding dress. I wore it July 26, 1997 when my Sweetie and I got married in Albuquerque, NM. It was a pretty hot dress for a July wedding! But it was pretty much my dream dress (such a 1990s dress, eh?). And I got a great deal on it!
Sweetie and I were engaged almost 3 years before we got married. In fact, I bought this dress about a month before we were officially engaged. In the States, there are usually GREAT Thanksgiving weekend sales, and while visiting with Sweetie’s family, we saw an ad in the paper for a Bridal Shop that was having a massive sale. My soon-to-be mom-in-love and I decided to check it out.
This was the first dress I tried on, though not the last. And it was a store model (i.e, one that people came in to try on and then order their own). That meant that it had a smudge of lipstick on the inside lining of the bodice, and a few small holes in the mesh collar and back, as well as some floor smudges on the bottom of the dress. I didn’t care about the lipstick smudge, an figured I could fix the tulle/mesh, and the smudges on the botton were nothing that a good dry cleaning wouldn’t fix. Besides, the tag on the dress said $1375 – but I got it for $299!!!!!!!
Because I’m so short, it needed some alterations, and I paid about $100 to have some help with some of it (not through the bridal shop but through a family friend), and my mom-in-love and I did the rest. The help part was needed for the skirt of the dress. With all the detail on the bottom of the skirt (sequins, cutouts, beadings, etc.) the skirt had to be removed from the bodice and shortened from the top, not the bottom. And I also needed a bit of help with the invisible zipper and the top of the neck.
With the plunging neckline, and me being so short, I also embellished the ‘cleavage’ area with some more beads and sequins to sorta cover up what the whole world (i.e., my groom who stood a foot taller than me, and his groomsmen all but one of whom were taller than him, and our pastors, etc….) didn’t need to see.
There are some fun details you can’t see on the photo – like some fun dangly beads on the puff of the sleeves, and the V-shape at the end of the sleeves that came down to the middle of the back of my hand. Also, I wore white satin slippers all day! 🙂
The other part of the story with the dress shopping is that they had bridesmaids’ dresses on sale that day, too. I knew I wanted pink and blue (though hadn’t decided on what shades) so I browsed through the racks (also knowing who my bridesmaids would be if I could pick them at that moment). My maid-of-honor is VERY red-headed, so I planned to put her in blue, and wouldn’t you know it, I found a royal blue dress in her size WITH accents that EXACTLY matched my dress. I picked it up, because I have a grandmother who is quite the seamstress and can recreate things with no pattern. I thought we might be able to make the other matching dresses if I didn’t find anything else. But halfway around the sale rack were 3 pink (fuschia, hot pink, bright pink) dresses in the same style, 2 of which were in the sizes I would need for the other 2 bridesmaids! And, of course, they were on sale…. $300 dresses that I paid $29 a piece for!
In total, I paid $299 + $100 (alterations) + 3x($29) = just at $500 (with tax) for $3300 worth of dresses!
Regardless of my ‘cheap’ dress, I did feel like a princess on my wedding day, albeit a sometimes very sweaty princess! LOL! July in NM???? Yah, it was hot!
My dress is packed in a big box in the attic, sealed completely shut with packing tape. (We were told to do that so it wouldn’t yellow…?) I wasn’t feeling like digging it out and cutting the tape again to take photos today (too many other things on the to-do-list today!).
Unfortunately, it’s not in the best shape… It sat in my Sweetie’s parents’ attic in NM for a few years, and the heat up there melted some of the fabric glue I had used to secure the beads and sequins on the netting on the neckline. I did open the box when they brought it up to Canada in 2002, and didn’t try to put it on, being 2 months post-partum with my last kiddo, and also being disappointed by the ‘mess’ of the beads. I do remember my little almost 3-yr-old daughter standing in the middle of the bodice with all the folds of skirt around her while she tried to put it on. TOO CUTE!
I wouldn’t sell my dress for anything. I don’t know if my daugher would wear it, as #1) she’s probably going to be a fair bit taller than me, and #2) wedding dresses seem to be less ‘floufie’ now (sleeveless or small sleeves instead of these big puffy sleeves) – though who knows, styles change, right? But, I would keep it for the simple reason that it’s another symbol of the committment I made to my Sweetie, and for me, selling it or just giving it away to just anyone would someone fly in the face of that committment.
As someone who sews quite a bit, I feel confident that I could fix the netting/mesh/toule stuff at the neckline again if I needed to, and I could even alter the dress completely, using parts of it to make a new one, if my daughter or grand-daughter might want that.
I’ll probably take it out again and my daughter and I will ‘play’ with it a bit. It’s just a thing, a thing I got a GREAT deal on, a thing that is very special and holds great meaning and memories – but I’ve learned to not be quite so sentimental about such things. If nobody in the family wants it, I might end up taking it apart and making a quilt or wall-hanging out of it….
So, did you keep or sell your wedding dress? Have some fun/wacky/not-so-nice memories of the wedding day, etc.? Join in on the Wedding Dress Blog Tour. Write up about your dress, then head over and fill-in Mr. Linky on Shash’s Dress post.
thank you