As soon as we settled on our colors, I knew I wanted navy blue bridesmaids’ dresses. I quickly fell in love with this dress by Adrianna Papell.
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Image via Nordstrom
I became obsessed within seconds. I am partial to dresses with one shoulder, and I absolutely loved the lace. This had to be the dress!! I emailed it to my bridesmaids and within hours my dream died. The dress sold out in some sizes, including smaller ones that I knew we would need. Argh!! (Of course it now seems to be available in more sizes.)
In my quest to recreate this dress, I stumbled upon the Watters Camellia dress.
Mr. B’s daughter A is going to be our junior bridesmaid. She is 10, which is a little too old for a flower girl and not quite old enough for a bridesmaid. I don’t entirely understand the role of a junior bridesmaid, but the plan is to have her walk down the aisle and then most likely sit with her grandparents instead of standing with the bridal party. After all, there won’t be a lot of room up there with the ridiculous size of our bridal party.
Although A is excited to be in the wedding, she is not excited about getting dressed up for it. She is a tomboy through and through—no princesses, no skirts, nothing girly. She would rather be in mesh shorts and a dri-fit T-shirt than anything else. Unfortunately our wedding is a little more formal than athletic wear, so we need to figure out what to put her in.
She came with me to Jacksonville on our bridesmaids’ dress shopping trip, and she was hoping/expecting to pick out something to wear as well. We looked at all the pretty dresses in the store and she kept asking when we were going to a store to look at something for her. I showed her the dresses designed for flower girls and junior bridesmaids, but she kept insisting that she wanted to wear “church pants and a collared shirt,” which equates to khakis and a polo. And sneakers if she has it her way. As much as I really do want her to be comfortable, I will not be comfortable if she walks down the aisle looking like this:
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Image via Continental Uniform
I don’t have a good idea of what I do want her to wear, though, since I hate most dresses designed for young girls.
This contest is now closed. Congrats to our winner, #43 amberella12
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Hi hive! Lucky for you (gorgeous!) and your bridesmaids (free!), our friends at Little Borrowed Dress are giving away up to four free bridesmaids’ dress rentals to one lucky Weddingbee reader!
Little Borrowed Dress is the first online wedding boutique to offer bridesmaids’ dresses for rent starting at just $50, giving brides and bridesmaids the opportunity to choose gorgeous dresses that are incredibly affordable. Better yet, because the dresses are for rent, that means that you and your bridesmaids can pick dresses perfectly tailored to your wedding, and you can skip the “you can totally wear that again!” schpiel.
Why Little Borrowed Dress? Why not! Dresses starting at $50 means more money to spend on shoes and accessories…the stuff we all actually like wearing again. If your bridesmaids fall in love with the dresses, they can purchase them if they’d like. All styles are available for sale, starting at $150.
All dresses are manufactured in the Garment District in NYC and are designed to flatter all figures, with built-in adjustment points (things like elasticated waist lines and adjustable ties). Don’t worry about fit: they’ll send a free “back up” size with every rental!
Renting is simple and hassle-free via the website. Order online and the dress will arrive two weeks prior to your wedding date, all ready-to-wear. When the wedding’s over, pop it back in the mail in LBD’s pre-paid packaging that comes with the dress.
Request a free fabric swatch and find the perfect LBD dress color to match your wedding.
To enter to win up to 4 free bridesmaids’ dress rentals:
You have until April 23, 2013 at 11:59PM PST to enter. Good luck, hive!
On Good Friday there is a tradition where I live to walk up Rivington Pike—the summit of a large hill on the Pennines.
This has always been my favourite tradition, and I would walk up that hill come rain or shine—but this Good Friday I had to miss it. You see, this Good Friday, as everyone else was off walking and having fun, we were off bridesmaids’ dress shopping. (It was totes fun for me, maybe not the girls!)
We were up bright and early and started the way any busy day should—with a full English (OK, only half a full English, as it was Good Friday and we weren’t allowed any meat) and a few pancakes. There would be no lunch break today—we needed all the fuel we could get!
My bridesmaids are all very different. Different hair colours, skin tones, heights, and sizes.
Bridesmaids’ dress shopping is going to be tricky.
You see, the dress that seems to suit most people is a full-length strapless ball gown. Except strapless is the one thing I do not want, and my dress isn’t even completely full length, so how’s that going to look?
When I first thought about these dresses, I just wanted everyone to be happy and comfortable and wearing something they liked. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that it would just be too hard. I don’t have seven bridesmaids that can wear all different dresses in roughly the same colour and look effortlessly beautiful.
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Image via One Stylish Bride / Photo by Todd Pellowe
Another very important decision was made this week—the bridesmaids decided on their dresses!
Yes, you read that correctly—they decided on their dresses, not me! Once I determined the designer (Alfred Sung), fabric (peau de soie), and color (ebony), I asked the girls to collectively decide on one style of dress. Over the course of the decision making, my favorite dress fluctuated. I even went so far as momentarily considering letting each girl pick a different style dress just so I wouldn’t have to make a decision!
After a ton of discussion and an outing with a couple of the ladies (I’ll refrain from posting supremely embarrassing photos, although they do exist!), we had the field narrowed down to a select few dresses.
It’s difficult enough to find a dress for me. A small part of me wanted no piece of choosing a dress for my friends.
Enter my matron of honor! Ah, my best friend. We’ll call her JJ. I knew she’d be there for me—that’s why I asked her to be such a special part of my wedding! On a trip up to Pennsylvania for a weekend, we went to a local salon and she modeled for me as I sat back in a comfy chair and drank some wine. That. Was. The. Life. I wish we could have included some other bridesmaids, but I have eight. Yes, eight. This is more on the part of Cam than on me…honestly! When we sat down to try and figure out our wedding party, he gave me a list of 15 guys!!! I made him narrow it down, but eight was as low as he’d go. So I came up with eight bridesmaids. And they are all scattered across the Eastern Seaboard. It would have been impossible to arrange a day that everyone could go together, but I figured they would trust my judgment. And I had MOH JJ there to represent for them.
She tried on five or six dresses, but none of them was quite right. This one was too long. That one was too short. This one was too tight. That one was too bulky. We wanted fun, flirty, and comfortable. And as always, I wanted them to “be able to wear it again!” (Side bar: I’ve been a bridesmaid in seven weddings. I have seven bridesmaids’ dresses hanging in my closet. Well, six. One of them was too ugly to give up the closet space. I have never. EVER. worn a dress again…but my wedding is different. Let me think that for now.)
After I said yes to my dress, hugged the store manager AND my attendant, and paraded around a bit, it was time to choose the bridesmaids’ dresses.
A lot of people expressed surprise when I mentioned we were aiming to get both my dress and their dresses chosen in one day. Honestly, it wasn’t any additional stress and it was necessary for us. At that time, we were pretty much scattered: Rev. Fun hailed from Atlanta, BM Badonk lived an hour away, BM Tiny Dancer was in college about three hours away, and BM Blackout and MOH Mem worked in the healthcare field and had to schedule days off two months in advance—if we had a weekend where we were all together, we were going to take full advantage and get sh-t done, for real.
Again, I had a pretty strict set of ideas in my head: no strapless, I wanted MOH Mem to be in a different color, I wanted them to be all the same style, and I wanted them long. Even though I had what I wanted picked out (I won’t shove the DB Dress Your Wedding image in your faces again, but I will tell you that you can find it here), I had sent an email to my girls telling them I was open to their opinions and ideas. I assured them that I would not pull a Topanga, but I also let them know that they didn’t have to like the dress in terms of style—they just had to be comfortable and able to dance.
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Image via Screenshot via YouTube / “Those. are. the most BEAUTIFUL dresses I have EVER seen.”
My main goal was finding one dress that fit everyone. When you have a variety of heights (I’m talking from 5’4” to right around 6’), weights, shapes, booties, bazoombas, and not to mention a variety of skin and hair colors, it seems next to impossible, but I was confident that I had chosen quite a few dresses (including backups, of course) that would fit and flatter everyone.
After weeks of indecision and frustration (summarized here), I decided to narrow down the dress search for my awesome sisters upon Sister A’s request. I thought she would want to pick her own dress, but it turns out she was perfectly happy being given a dress to wear—she’s not much of a shopper! I wanted to make sure I had options for Sister E, though.
Remember, my dress is the J.Crew Sophia in ivory silk chiffon. I wanted something to match the simple style and flowy fabric—simplest way to do that is to buy the bridesmaids’ dresses from J.Crew as well. These dresses can run on the expensive side (for college students especially), but they’re simple and classy and the important thing is to look for a good deal.
In about 10 minutes I scanned the J.Crew website and came up with four of their bridesmaids’ dress options that fit what I was looking for. Remember that the only stipulations originally were that they needed to be knee length and not strapless (conservative family reasons), and I preferred them to be in a shade of the wedding colors (which included anything coral, light green, light blue, lavender, yellow…or even gray).
Images via J.Crew / The J.Crew Mirabelle, Sinclair, Louisa, and Heidi
Unfortunately, these dresses were still $250 or more. I found some great deals on eBay and other dress-resale sites that made me think this could actually work—and then I found the sale section of the J.Crew site.
This isn’t exactly the post I wanted to write. I wanted to write about how I let my bridesmaids (my two sisters, remember?) pick whatever they wanted, how they’re going to wear their dresses over and over, and how it was so easy and casual and perfectly coordinating without being too matchy.
Well. It didn’t work just like that. But first let’s look at my inspiration pictures.
Image via Style Me Pretty / Photo by Braedon Photography
So for the bridesmaids’ dresses, I’m going the old school route and having the ladies all wear the same dress. While I do think the trend of different colors/styles of dresses is really cool, I’m the type of girl who likes matching looks. And since these girls are my leading ladies, I also want to make sure that throughout the big day, there is no question as to whether or not these girls are in the bridal party.
It took me some time to find the perfect dress for them, though—I have such a diverse group of ladies that it looks like a UN summit when we get together, so I wanted to make sure to find something that would look beautiful on each of them (regardless of skin tone and body shape). What I needed was a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants type dress—something that miraculously looked amazing on each of them.
I had some dresses in mind when I begin my initial search, so I stopped by a bridesmaids’ dress shop in Manhattan called Here Comes the Bridesmaid where I went looking specifically for the two dresses below.
Image via Dessy.com
I’m sorry to have kept y’all waiting for so long. I told you about my inspiration and trying on dresses (in bridal salons and from BHLDN), but never actually showed you my ladies’ final choice! My bad!
As three out of four bridesmaids don’t live in the U.S., I was the “eyes and ears” for my bridesmaids’ dress shopping. I scouted out options, but left the final choice up to my ladies. I sent them pictures of me in different dresses to vote upon. First they ranked the dresses according to which style they liked best (with one clear winner), and then decided on the dress color (according to photos of swatch cards and digital mock-ups).
…and the winner is:
Wtoo’s “172″ in Amethyst
{image via Watters}
…which looks more like this in real life:
Ah, hive! The day has finally arrived where I can reveal (most) of the mismatched BM dresses! You see, I have had most of the photos for a while, but then I forgot to save BM Blondesquared’s photos, so I had to get them again. Oops. 
Remember, this is the idea of what we were going for:
Image via Style Me Pretty / Photography by Jessica Lorren Organic Photograph
While I never wrote a full post about it, I talked a little on the boards about how I really wanted dresses the girls would want to wear again. I know it’s cliche to say, but I really didn’t want them to hate their dresses, I didn’t want them to spend a ton on them, and I wanted it to be something they could wear to work or another event. My only request was that they stay in the champagne/tan family, and to keep them short and affordable!
Thankfully, affordability wasn’t a problem at all—all of the girls got their dresses for $40 or less! In fact, MOH Cubbie got her dress at Forever 21, so she even got a second option! I’m a little in love with all of them, especially the first two, so let’s just say if they don’t end up wanting to wear them again, I won’t mind taking them off their hands. 
And here they are!
Oh my gosh, hive! Upfront I feel the deep need to apologize for my absence around these parts lately. Simply put, life has gotten crazy busy in Armadillo Land. Before I knew it, Thanksgiving had come and passed and now we’re on the countdown to Christmas! Anyone else feel like the last couple of months of this year have gone by at warp speed? It totally freaks me out.
Anyway, just because I’ve gone MIA on Weddingbee doesn’t mean I haven’t been hard at work on wedding-related activities, so I can come back and share some updates with you guys! A few posts back I shared what we had planned for my lovely bridesmaids to wear down the aisle. They ranked their favorites on Weddington Way, each chose a different dress from the Alfred Sung line by Dessy, and fabric swatches helped solidify the decision to go with the dupioni fabric in “Dahlia.” However, I didn’t exactly feel comfortable asking my girls to fork out money for dresses they hadn’t even tried on, so last Tuesday I set up an appointment for me and three of my girls at a bridal boutique in Houston. Unfortunately, MOH Henna lives in Arizona and couldn’t make the trip with us, but the rest of my girls piled into my car and we made the two hour drive to Weddings by Debbie, which was the closest retailer that carried the Alfred Sung line.
Weddings by Debbie is a fancy schmancy “appointment only” salon, and I’ve got to be honest; I had no idea what the place was going to be like when I booked the appointment. The only reason I picked Weddings by Debbie in the first place was because it was the closest salon that carried Alfred Sung dresses. Needless to say, when we walked in and saw the $10,000 couture bridal gowns on the showroom floor, we felt a little…erm…out of place. They also had a few plaques up on the wall displaying their status as a “The Knot Pick of 2010″ and “The Knot Pick of 2011.” We warily told the receptionist at the front that we were there for an appointment in the bridesmaids salon and were pointed in the direction we needed to go.
Once upon a time, I narrowed the choices for bridesmaids’ dresses down to two, a convertible Jenny Yoo and a lacy ModCloth.
