Weddingbee Blog

So we didn’t just pull into the strip mall, exactly. Really, I zoomed past the strip mall, and without my aunt’s eagle eyes, we might never have found the salon. After circling the block and finding a parking spot right in front of the doors, we entered Bella Bridal and Formal Wear in St. Charles.

We were greeted immediately by Katie at the front desk, and together we went through my printouts of Watters dresses. Unfortunately, they don’t carry the dress I fell in love with from Minnesota, AND the trunk show I went to the salon for was actually the previous month. (The CS Brides website was way out of date.) Luckily for me, if I found a dress that day, they’d still let me use the discount!! So together, the four of us started pulling dress after dress into the fitting room. First, I tried on the Watters dresses: Sahara, Austin, Lasara, and Tyler.

Tyler by Watters

Tyler was the favorite of the bunch—easily an 8.5 on our dream wedding-dress scale. It just had a movement that the others didn’t, and the texture of the fabric made the dress interesting without being fussy. The silk organza was really romantic, too—a soft fabric like that just screams “Whisk me away!” With eight more dresses in the dressing room, we kept that one off to the side and kept plowing through dresses. Next up were some heavier satin dresses in shades of blush, ivory, and steel blue, but none of them really spoke to me. They mostly felt too heavy for our September wedding, and the satin was just too formal for our whole affair. After wading through those five dresses, we were on to the Enzoani dresses, a favorite designer from our trip to White Chicago.

First came Elizabeth, a gorgeous silk taffeta, sweetheart-necklined, ruched, trumpet gown with a little bit of bling on the hip. The dress made me look 15 pounds thinner and solicited oohs and ahhs from Mama Bacon and my aunt. The secret to my magic weight loss in the dress came 100% from the five minutes and three pairs of hands that it took to get me into the dress; I couldn’t even bend over in the sample since I was so stuffed in! I knew at that moment what it must have been like for women 200 years ago in corsets that needed a dresser on staff. We dressed it up with shoes and a sash but, while it was easily a 9, we couldn’t quite persuade it to be a 10.

Elizabeth by Enzoani

So off it went and here came Elaine, a silk satin, strapless, ruched, trumpet gown with beading at the top and a gathered detail at the hip. They put it on me, and I stepped up on the stage and said to them, “So, this feels like a prom dress.” The ladies were shocked since my aunt was already calling it a 9.5 and my mom was already imagining me walking down the aisle in it. Why prom? Well, because of the neckline—it was too plain, cut straight across. I preferred the sweetheart neckline from the previous dress. Also, beading? Really? Have we met? Sooooooooo not my thing. And satin? Didn’t I just cover the fact that satin was too heavy and formal for the whimsical September nuptials we had planned?

Elaine by Enzoani

But then we started talking about the little things that we could do to alter the dress, like how it would take alterations five minutes to remove the beading and change the neckline to a sweetheart. After a quick reference at the order book, Katie confirmed that I could get the dress in taffeta instead of satin, and things started to shift. The veil was back on my head, shoes appeared on my feet, the finishing touch—a bouquet of silk flowers—was added, and suddenly my mom was crying, my aunt was crying, and even I was tearing up. She was the one. Not only is my best friend (MOH Bacon) named Elaine, so is my wedding dress!!

Happy Bacons after a looooong day of dress shopping!

Please excuse the crazy, mind-of-its-own birdcage veil. I’m not sure how to tame it.

Are you making any major changes to your dress?