Wedding Blog

Going along with my ever-present theme of changing my mind about every possible wedding-related detail, I did the unthinkable and changed plans on my bridesmaids after I’d already asked them to buy their dresses. Before you think I’m a horrible person, please hear me out!

I had originally been planning a pomegranate and gold color scheme, and I found these cute, classic pomegranate-colored dresses (called vintage burgundy) on the J.Crew website.

Source

I thought the color was perfect and the shape would flatter all my ’maids. I was excited to cross something off my to-do list, as the wedding planning was feeling pretty overwhelming at this point.

As the planning progressed, an English garden, vintage-y theme began to emerge and, along with it, a new color scheme:

Cream, pale pale pink, and gold.

I thought I could keep pomegranate/berry as an accent color and that the bridesmaids dresses would still look great. But one fateful day as I was catching up on Weddingbee, I stumbled upon Mrs. Cherry Pie’s gorgeous Montana wedding. Something looked familiar about those bridesmaids dresses. They looked just like the ones I had picked out—only they were bright red! I frantically scrolled through Mrs. Cherry Pie’s backlog of blog posts to see if she had blogged about buying the dresses. Sure enough, she had—and the dresses were the exact same ones I had picked out, in vintage burgundy. Only “vintage burgundy” looked like this:

Beautiful, but not the color I had in mind!

Is it just me, or does that look distinctly like red, not burgundy/berry/pomegranate/what-have-you? This color, I quickly realized, would not work with the creams and pale pinks I had picked out for the flowers and decorations. I thought about just sucking it up, since the girls had bought their dresses so long ago, and J. Crew’s return policy is only store credit after sixty days. But I knew in my gut that I was going to be unhappy with that decision, so I emailed the gals and threw myself at their mercy. Luckily, they are all awesome, and they agreed to exchange the dresses for new ones.

Some mix-n-match, black dress inspiration.

We decided together that black dresses would be the way to go. I’m actually really excited about it because it means that each girl can pick out a dress in any style she wants–I love photos I’ve seen from other weddings where each ’maid is wearing a different style dress. And, even though it will be extra hassle for my ’maids (sorry, ladies!), in the end they will each have a chic black dress that they are more likely to wear again. Finally, the black dresses will allow me to add little black accents throughout the ceremony and reception in order to cut down on the sweetness factor of all the pastels. And the bridesmaids’ cream-colored bouquets (more on that later!) will really pop against the black.

While this isn’t the only time I’ve changed my mind about a wedding-related decision I had previously made, this is the first time it’s directly affected someone other than me. I’m realizing now that I really need to get it together and stop making decisions willy-nilly.

What lessons have you learned throughout the wedding-planning process?