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?: