Friday, February 17, 2012

Bridesmaid dress shopping... a rather pleasant experience

My Bridesmaids.. I have three of them... And they are some of my favourite people.

Credit to Low Budget Fairy tale weddings
L is my MOH, chosen as she was the one that originally set up FH and I to meet at the Opera Bar in Sydney at a get together after Christmas catch up do. I was there with workmates and FH was with L and her friends. One thing lead to another and that's how we got to plan a wedding. I also knew her through work when she came in with jobs. She has been fantastic with helping me find my wedding dress and being a sounding board when I'm not sure about things. She even came up to Darwin to keep me company a few times when FH went overseas the first time.

A is one of my workmates who is a great friend. We travelled to Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore and Bali together and had a fantastic time exploring the different countries. She's helped me through a bad break up and tells me when I'm too skinny. We go to the cricket, movies, dinner and have had some awesome nights out on the town. Hence she's played an important part in my life and that's why I asked her to be one of my Bridesmaids.

And my sister AK, who has always been there through thick and thin, through family squabbles, through climbing trees and causing chaos. She was an immediate choice as I couldn't think of getting married without her playing an important role. She lives in New Zealand, so I've tried to involve her in everything as much as I can.

Credit to Exclusively Bridesmaids
So that's my three bridesmaids just briefly.

A couple of days ago i managed to convince A to come and look at some dresses. I rang up Exclusively Bridesmaids in Miranda and locked in a time. I was very lucky that L was available to come and try some dresses on as well. L and I had breakfast together and met A at the dress shop as she was coming from the eastern suburbs and we live in the south.
My Original Favourite

Jenna, the shop assistant met us as we came in and she was very welcoming and friendly. She asked me to fill in a form and pick five dresses that we first liked to try on. We wandered around the shop and I told the girls to pick out whatever they liked to try on as I didn't really have any rules as to what I wanted. I just wanted the girls to look amazing.

The Paris Dress (my photo)
One of the dresses - Paris, was one similar to one of my original favourites that id ripped out of a magazine ages ago. I also had a sample dress made of it in China but the quality was terrible, don't order anything from the website Zoom bridal. I lost $150 thanks to that little adventure. Anyway back on track.... They had Paris in a charcoal colour and taffeta. They tried it on a it looked rather cute but I still knew in my heart that I wanted the long flowing chiffon dresses. So onto the long dresses we went.

Some of them were quite nice on, others didn't sit right, some just looked plain terrible. The pink dress in the photo underneath was nice, but it didn't really do any justice to the girls. But then i had the oooooh moment and L said that she knew that it might be the dress cause I had the same look on my face that I had when I had found my wedding dress.,

A dress they tried on (my photo)
The girls looked amazing in the dress. It sat and flowed beautifully. It is very flattering and they could sit and move in it comfortably without having to worry. It looked very romantic and flowing, and the girls just looked fantastic in it. It was elegant, and at the end of the day, they could shorten it to the knee and they would have a lovely cocktail dress as well.

They tried on a few more dresses but we kept on coming back to the one, as I will affectionately name it.

I called ahead to another bridal shop to see whether we could drop in while I had both the girls together, and they weren't busy so we popped by and also had a look at a few other shops in Miranda:
Another dress (my photo)

The purple dress in the photo on the left was rather nice but A thought she'd be constantly pulling it up during the day and I wanted the girls to be comfortable, so we decided that a strapless was definitely not the way to go.
The actual dress teaser

But it was rather funny for me to note that i wasn't interested in any of these dresses because the material felt funny, the dresses were boring or the staff weren't that helpful and I kept thinking back to the one.

The one turned out to be a Henry Roth dress to my surprise and I remembered that he was having a floor sale, so we had a quick look in the sale yesterday but didn't find the dress so I went back to Exclusively Bridesmaids, armed with my deposit and locked on the one. It was a lot over my budget as I originally thought that we would have cocktail dresses for $200, but it was definitely worth the extra overtime shifts I'm going to be doing....

The parts of the dress detail is in the photo on the right. I'm not going to show the whole dress so there is still an element of surprise. But the neckline and the buckle are important parts of the dress. Which is great because I can team some nice sparkly long drop earrings and a sparkly cuff bracelet with it and a sparkly hair comb for their up style. So I'm rather happy with our efforts over the last couple of days. The company will send me a colour swatch to make sure its the definite right colour in three weeks and then the dresses should be ready in 4-5 months. Enough time to get them into a dressmaker and fitting superbly to the girls shapes.

3 comments:

  1. I will have to try exclusively bridemaids as we tried lu elle bridal and briony leigh and couldnt find anything. Are you a fellow shirey?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey K, yep sure am from the shire, well for the last year anyway. Caringbah is my home for the time being, its so nice. Exclusively Bridesmaids is great. They are on Kumulla road, turn left off taren point road, just before mc'donalds and they are at the end of the road.
      Really great service and beautiful dresses, they stock Dessy, Henry Roth and a few other designers :)

      Delete
    2. That sounds great. I will take a trip there. I've been living in Sutherland for the last 2 and a bit years.

      Delete