pick your favorite

so i didn't expect to be a one of those brides. you know the kind. the kind with two dresses. three dresses. four? okay well i don't want to get to the point of four. so i bought my tafetta david angelo solely for the purpose of using it for my trash the dress, since my favorites, silk charmeuse, would make me look like a drowned rat the second i hit water.

then i got to thinking, i could alter the alfred angelo to be that mermaid style that i like so much, that none of my top dress contenders boasted, and despite the tafetta swishing around all day and sounding very huggies diaper-like, it would facilitate my birdcage veil and it could function as my sole wedding dress. here's my bad photoshop rendition, i even made the sleeves a little skinnier.
option 1: alfred angelo 1148, altered mermaid style



option 2, birnbaum and bullock: $2700 + probably $400 for a rush order, + $300-500 for alterations at the fancy pants kind of shop it comes from (although it is made specifically for my body specifications to minimize the need for alterations...). the one thing i am totally in love with is that i can dance holding my train on either my wrist or my pinky and it would look fabulous. is that brief effect worth thirty five hundred some odd dollars? again, see my terrible photoshop rendition:


option 3, random dress, $875, no train, silk charmeuse


i originally had no budget, but $875 seems like too good of an idea to pass up on....but i don't have the great train-dancing action....originally i didn't care for a train because of my outdoor ceremony, but that train is so great....

luly yang couture

the first store i hit up today downtown was seattle designer, luly yang. while her website doesn't feature each dress, it does show clips from her runway shows that are just to die for. her store boasts evening gown couture and classy pieces in the back room, in addition to her bridal wear.

hello my good friend, silk charmeuse. except this time, without the rusching, the assistant drew my attention to true nature of the fabric...it shows everything! including your belly button and any sort of tummy bulge you may think you don't have!

this slinky number says 1920's, and while i'd have to throw away any notions of birdcage veils, i might be able to pull of these feathery etsy things i'd featured in a previous post


to disguise the tummy bulge, the consultant, who was a young couture dress designer herself, suggested altering it to have a few lines of rusching across the area. here's the rusching i invision:


to do nothing else but demonstrate the rusched look the dress could have, she then pulled out this hot little number from a secret closet that had an amazing price tag of 800-some-odd-dollars! it's got a cowl neck in the front, scoops down elegantly in the back, and is a lot cheaper than the $2700 birnbaum and bullock that i've been seriously considering.

obviously this was a photos-don't-fly-zone, and while in the past, the assistants have let me sketch out the dresses at other shops, i was hesitant to ask since the assitant kindly offered to sketch a mock up of any design tweaks we discussed at every given moment. so here's what i can remember of it, i'm pretty sure i didn't quite capture the bust area, but here's the gist. speaking of simplicity and shine, maybe i'm better off getting that hot red bridesmaid's dress in a white for ~$100-200ish.


i tried on this hot little number (~$2K) made from italian stretch satin, it is gorgeous but not nearly as liquidy in real life:

i have nothing but a stunned reverance for seattle flickrite myla kent who somehow makes seriously unexpected artwork out of luly yang window displays and runway shows

ready for another dress orgy, ladies?

so i braved downtown seattle again today to tackle two of the three bridal places i'd set out to tackle. today was a good day to do it because it's sunday, and the meter parking is free unlike in vancouver. meter parking is also free after 6pm on weekdays, vs. 8pm in vancouver. i'd heard great things about cicada from local people that represented both rich brides and poor brides alike, not to mention brides with impending weddings and short timelines. the shop was surprisingly spacious and beautifully laid out. i was greeted by a sweet older lady, and i even noticed one of the designers milling about the store and helping out here and there. two great girls helped me out and i had a fabulous time trying on dresses and accessories. the staff said they'd received mixed reviews online, and they were delighted to hear that they'd get a great review from me as i walked out the door just as they closed up shop.
side note laurie - you have to go shopping on 1st ave with me.

cicada gets an "A" in my books because a) they allow photographs b) everything is classically clean and simple (do you know how hard it is to find a simple dress?) c) it's all handmade by the instore designers and seamstresses, so go local! d) they have almost all their samples available in extra-small through large so it's even more exciting for someone petite like me e) they have birdcage veils and other hard to find accessories in stock!



this was the dress that i had scoped out on their website in a beautiful sheen:

the portrait neckline enticed me (bottom left image in montage), but i wasn't quite sold by how the model pulled it off.
i decided to grab the portrait dress as an afterthought just 5 minutes before closing and was pleasantly suprised at how good it looked despite the website image, but wasn't too keen on the two-piece idea for myself (although the top half would go smashing with a pair of jeans and i really could wear it again and again. i made a similar comment to a lady at a very high end couture boutique some time ago and she looked at me like i had four heads coming out of my shoulders):



the saleslady mentioned they had another with a portrait neckline, and i was so happy she took the time at the end of her workday to let me try it on because it was the best of the bunch! as long as it can be cinched around my waist as tight in alterations as clamps have been capable of time and time again in giving me an hourglass figure, i think it's pretty promising. and it could go with my birdcage veil.



i do love how fabrics like silk charmeuse just glow (and in this case, i believe a satin). however, they don't lend well to birdcage veils :(



here's some more dresses. this one here reminds me of the $330 maggie.


and then trying it without the ruffling along the bustline:


because, again, every store has a fun little number. this was also their in a delicate light blue that looked fantastic on the hanger:



lace! lace! i had high hopes for this dress, but it just didn't do it for me.

here's my attempt to make it have a sweetheart neckline:




another cowl neck they happened to have:


they stock fur capelets and both organza and lacey boleros, and millenery finds to boot, including birdcage veils!!! up until today, i'd never been in a store with any mentionable birdcage veils to speak of.




dresses are hemmed to your length at no charge, dresses come in standard xs/sm/med/lg sizes, and alterations are by the hours - otherwise a neat option is to add 25% onto the pricetag and the dress will be custom built for your body, with a muslin mock up made ahead of time to ensure the perfect fit.
i found this online and forgot to try it on:

sottero and midgley

for all of you keeping up with my gown play by play, i'd hoped to perhaps venture downtown today for my day off to get the last three great stores in the area over and done with....but we got a fresh blanket of snow this morning.

being a person from the westcoast, snow is scary, and this has kept me from jumping into my car truck (yes, my daily commuter vehicle it is a V6 pickup, a 4x4 no less) and braving the 520 across lake washington. this is a phenomenon only experienced by people in Vancouver, BC and Seattle, WA, as people who've relocated from back east to these regions think we've got four heads coming out of our shoulders when we fret about 2 inches of snow. the fear of the 520 in bad weather conditions, though, is a legitimate fear i believe, since the waves can come up and over the edge on stormy days.

so today i've cozied up in some sweats and discovered some e-candy from sotteroandmidgley - who knew there was more great maggie goodness out there (well, i didn't)! this little image on the right did not have a corresponding large image on the site, but i love the concept of sleeves. why are sleeves so rare! and why are the two boleros that each store seems to carry so hideous looking? many a store has told me a seamstress can easily make tulle sleeves and tulle boleros but i'm a little hesitant.

i love this sweet little number (oh how i'd love to pull off pale pink on my wedding day). i can't decide if i like this one better than vernice, and then again, there was that pink madina vadache...:


these two dresses remind me of melissa sweet (although it could just be the effect the sashes have on me since so few of maggie's are featured with sashes):



i like the concept of this dress but a) the lace is too dense in the ovary-area and should just be limited to the bustline and the bottom, and b) i think the train should be either made entirely of the chunky tulle.


hello cinderella dress! this color is called oceana. i love it!

this one's for all the marbles....

okay ladies. so everyone with august weddings, i hope you've already put your orders in for your dresses, because i certainly haven't. i feel like perhaps i'm one of the few bees that doesn't have her act together (although what bride really does) - i'd love to be one of the bees that blogs retroactively, calmly outlining the details of events past, like fiascos that happened several months previous that can be uttered only now because it's taken this long to get over them emotionally. i'm not quite in panic mode yet, but i could definitely use some direction.

that montage makes me look like a bit of a freak, and there's a whole lot more than 26 dresses there. perhaps the scariest thing is not that there were 3 or 4 more stores that didn't allow me to take any photos, but that most of these were taken in the past 10 days!

so i've been waffling between two dresses i'd seen at the first two stores i ever visited, way back in may. did i just say may? yep. okay so there's been quite the lazy lull in the interim, my own proverbial 400 years of silence, if you will, and i've been mixing it up this past week, desperately trying to find what everyone calls "the one," all the while each salesgirl's voice is ringing in my head: place your order by this weekend. so that's why this post is for all the marbles. help me pick! (side note, i haven't yet had a chance to visit cicada, luly yang, or marcella's in downtown seattle....should i?). at every store, the saleslady waits eagerly for that moment, the moment where i "light up" upon gazing upon myself in that perfect dress. but it hasn't happened, and i never anticipated it would. they all naysayed that attitude, saying it would indeed happen, but perhaps one particularly coiffed salesgirl said it best the other day: "maybe it won't be that way for you. maybe it'll be one that you'll think about for a while and come back to." this was also the girl, who, after 2 hours with me, articulated, quite frankly, "i'm not trying to sound like a bitch {when does prefacing your rant with that ever make things better?!}, but i really think your needs would be best met by a seamstress custom designing you a dress. you've said you've tried on a large number of dresses and you haven't found anything you liked. you know you like silk charmeuse, you know you like the mermaid silhouette, you know you like a sweet-heart neckline..." she went on for a good 2 minutes, making me feel hot in the face like i was an insecure brigette jones and was wasting her time. but i give her credit, because she's one of the rare types i've met who is truly in tune with her brides' body shapes and tastes and can aptly anticipate what will and what won't look good, and what they will and will not like without having them get squeeze into layers of crinolin and tulle in dress after dress after dress.

so i have the top two. and i don't have photos of me in them. which is perhaps a good thing considering i don't know how widespread my blog has become in terms of wedding guests. as a side note, did you guys know that the maggie sottero website showcases photos of real brides in almost all the dresses? i think that's brilliant. who cares that it lacks the java script coding to zoom in to 800%, i get to see real brides with real bodies, and in natural light!


this here is the closest dress i could find to my favorite at i do bridal in the wallingford area of seattle. it's a maggie sottero in the $900 range. it's very similar to this, except the lace is scalloped and there is no beading. it shares the straight across the top tube top look, and although i like sweetheart, this particular dress makes my shoulders look really great.
meet libby:



and here is the other top contender, birnbaum and bullock's hallie - okay the angle is hideous and does the dress absolutely no justice:

it's more like "nadine" on the right here, minus the flowers:


but now look i've found a maggie equivalent, "erin," and it even laces up the back! booya, birnbaum&bullock!


but then again i would never order a dress like this without being able to try it on, because i've tried on the slinky nicole miller dresses you'll all know from magazine ads and they droop terribly on me and kill any silhouette you thought i might have had. jenn i'm sure you remember those ones from west van.

maggie's cassady:



i think i like the cassady better than the allison marie i tried on (here in gold with a strange floral shawl):



and don't forget our $330 winner from before, here in white. i'm tempted to jump on this, except i was hoping it would come in ivory



perhaps the most suprising dress i viewed on the maggie website was the vernice dress. i was a little put off by how obnoxiously large the bust area was on me (the sample was a size 12 or 14 no doubt), but perhaps in a 0 the designer adjusts for the neckline/bustline, too?: