Quick wedding-related post for today... I bought my wedding dress last week!
If you know me in real life, you know I'm not a super picky person about clothes.
OR SO WE THOUGHT.
My "style," if you can even call it that, is very, very laid-back. Most of the time I'm not at work you'll find me wearing some kind of superhero/Star Wars/Doctor Who/Wisconsin sportsball related t-shirt, because I am a mature grown-up lady-person. If I'm really feeling fancy, I'll wear a shirt without any sort of logo or symbol on it and attempt to look cute, but that's not usual. I am not a girly person by any means. I am the only woman I know who has never voluntarily gotten a pedicure.
You can see how wedding planning has been sort of a challenge. I don't have a "vision," I don't have "colors." Basically, I just want to get married and throw all our friends a great party with awesome food.
That isn't to say I don't enjoy dressing up and looking nice - I do! I have lots of dresses that I wear for special occasions, lots of sundresses I wear when it's hot, and I am capable of throwing on a cute pair of boots with some kind of sassy shirt and looking like I know how to dress myself as a grown-up.
So I was thinking that finding a wedding dress was going to be a pretty laid-back affair. I wasn't married (get it?) to a particular style of dress, and there were only a few things that were absolutely out (mermaid silhouettes. Looking like Amy Adams at the beginning of Enchanted). I had a few things I was hoping to include in the dress, but wasn't totally set on a single thing.
And then I went dress shopping. Oy.
I went to a wide variety of bridal shops. I went to two very fancy boutiques downtown where I discovered that the price range listed on their websites included perhaps two dresses at the low end, but loved the people and the help I got there and found some dresses that were definitely beautiful, and I looked nice in, but were someone else's dresses. I also found two that were "pretty nice." While my entourage was wowed, I was not overly enthusiastic. They were pretty nice. They were fine. Most of the dresses I tried on were too much. Not too much money necessarily, just TOO MUCH DRESS for me. Even the ones that weren't poofy were just... too much. They weren't "Jess."
I went twice to a certain very large chain store twice where I had a great attendant once and found another "pretty nice" dress. The second time I went to aforementioned large chain store, my experience was not as great and got to the point where things were going so wrong, my moral support and I all found it very funny. I tried on the "pretty nice" actually-almost-perfect dress from the first visit and asked to speak with the alterations person, who took twenty minutes to come speak to me, only to immediately say, "No, there is no way. We can't do that." My radical alteration request? Make the straps slightly thinner.
So... forget that, I guess.
I was very discouraged at this point because I was ready to buy that dress that day, provided they could reassure me of the alterations I wanted. This was the sixth time I'd been out shopping and I was ready to throw on this ill-fitting white sundress I have and call it quits (which would have been totally fine, but for the ill-fitting part). My mom suggested we try one more place.
The attendant I had at the last store was wonderful. I told her what I'd liked about other dresses I'd tried, and she pulled a few dresses for me. My mom, my friend Shelly and I pulled a few more.
I wound up buying the very first dress my attendant had thought of. It has everything I wanted. I keep going to the designer's website and looking at it, which I didn't do with any of the previous dresses I thought I'd be buying, so that has to be a good sign. It was juuuuust under my budget. It felt like mine. I will not be posting a picture of it on the Internet until after the wedding.
And oh gosh, I hope it fits in a year!
And to show you how classy I am, I have to go because my toilet has just started overflowing.
Until next time!
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