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When chatting yesterday with Momma Hawk, she asked if I had received the latest email from Target about the new bridesmaid dress collection. Eerrrr, WHAT?!
Being an aficionado of all things Tar-jay, I was astounded that I had missed the announcement. Of course I immediately clicked away to Target.com to check them out.
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| Screenshot from Target |
There are currently nine dresses in the line, all affordable and priced at $69.99. The styles are fairly simple, but definitely cute! Here
are some of my favorites:
Read more…
If you recall, waaaaay back in October, my five best ladies all got together to go dress shopping. I had it in my head that, since each girl got to pick her own dress, it would be easy peasy. The only request I made was that the dresses be navy and somewhere between floor-length and “whore” length (aka anything from tea to knee). 
I imagined, before this trip, that everyone would find their dress and we would take a group shot. Well, only one-and-a-half dresses were found (and no, no one found just a skirt). Bridesmaid OT found her dress and Bridesmaid Sis tried on a dress that we ended up ordering from House of Brides. Everyone else left empty-handed. No group shot for me.
However, as the weeks went by, one by one I would get a cell phone picture of one of my bridesmaids in a dress she had found. Until last week, I got the last one, my sister’s dress had finally (it was not actually late as they told me it would ship in January but still…) arrived!
It was off to Photoshop to create that group picture I had been dreaming of!
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| From Left to Right: MOH MD, Red, Sis, OT, and Flossy* |
We received a call a few weeks ago that the bridesmaids dresses had arrived. I had not seen the dress in the specific color that I had chose, so I was slightly nervous. Why was I nervous? A famous dude named David Tutera made me nervous, that’s why!
I am sure most of us have all seen that awesome show, My Fair Wedding. Now don’t get me wrong, I love David Tutera’s weddings just as much as the next girl. They are always fabulous in every sense of the word. Yet, I think he gets something wrong when it comes to the color green. As most of you may know, David Tutera despises green when it comes to weddings.
In the article titled David Tutera Dreaming Bigger by Jennifer Florendo, he talks about all-things-wedding. He is quoted as saying, “I don’t hate green as a color in anything other than two things: fashion and lighting. When you light people in green, they look sick. It looks like Halloween. And I don’t like green in fashion for bridesmaids’ dresses, or in general. I just think it’s not a great color.”
This frightened me. Did I make a mistake choosing green as the color for the bridesmaids dresses? I’ll let you decide:
Read more…
Or blue…or yellow…or pink…
I have a love/hate relationship with our wedding colors. After setting my eyes on the perfect bridesmaids’ dress…
Image via Alfred Angelo
…I pretty much let the color of that dress dictate the rest of the wedding colors. I don’t have much of a theme going on except for the “get married with a minimal number of things going wrong” theme (trademark pending), so there isn’t much rhyme or reason to choosing the colors we did. I like that color, I think it’s pretty, aaaaand let’s move on to something else.
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For someone as indecisive as me, finding the bridesmaids’ dresses was actually pretty simple.
It all started years ago when I stumbled upon this dress in a bridal magazine:
Image via Alfred Angelo
I want it. I need it. Oh baby. Oh baby.
I love everything about it. The color, the fabric, the style. Some people go crazy about Mason jars and photo booths. I went cray-cray over this bridesmaids’ dress. Basically, I had to have it in my wedding.
Or How the J. Crew Warehouse Sales Rock My World. (But more on that in a minute…)
While vacationing in NorCal, one of the highlights of my trip was helping my little sister, Sissy Hawk, find the perfect bridesmaids dress. Even though she’s only eleven years old, she’s been one of my biggest cheerleaders. She jumped into the process wholeheartedly and has even dedicated hours to Say Yes to the Dress and David Tutera in support of my big day. So seeing her joy and letting her be the princess and the center of attention was incredibly fun.
You may remember a while back when I revealed that I had chosen to go with the J. Crew chiffon collection. Although they technically do not make junior bridesmaids dresses, they do offer petites in many of the styles, and they ended up looking great on Sissy Hawk.
Here were her top contenders:
#1 Juliet
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
It was a process, but once Foxy and I finally made the decision on what we wanted our respective bridal party halves to wear, we.. kind of.. stalled. More accurately, I was the one stalling. My ever present indecisiveness needed to be extra, extra, extra sure that was 110% settled on what we wanted folks to wear before getting the word out. Once November rolled around and the save the dates were sent and I realized I still hadn’t formally clued anyone in, I realized it was probably time to: 1. let everyone know what we want for ensembles, and 2. remind everyone they actually are in our wedding, seeing as we’ve been pretty hands off up to this point. Reminders are good, yes?
A nice email would have been fine, but I had this itch to amp it up and make it an email with an attachment. Ooooh.
For the ladies:
Picking bridesmaids’ dresses was something I was really looking forward to! Well, besides picking my own dress and all. But really, I couldn’t wait to see our bridesmaids in some pretty dresses, even if I haven’t found my own dress yet.
I already told you all that we’re each having one bridesmaid and one bridesman. We’re planning on having the boys in standard tuxes, but we want our girls in the same dress. I love the way the mismatched dresses look in bigger bridal parties, but I think that because there is only two girls standing up with us, and because they are on different sides, it will look more balanced to have the same dress. They agree!
Since we’re having a formal wedding, we’re looking for a floor-length bridesmaid dress. I’m not sure if I’ve ever explained our “color palette” but we’re going for a champagne, blush and ivory color scheme, and we want blush bridesmaid dresses. Similar to this color:
To say I was excited about our NYC shopping trip for dresses (of the wedding and bridesmaid variety) would be an understatement. The purpose of the day was to choose the bridesmaids’ dresses and narrow down my choices for a wedding dress.
Success would be walking away with a wedding-dress choice (that could be purchased closer to home) and ordering the bridesmaids’ dresses.
We started on super-early trains—converging upon NYC from Albany, Baltimore, Boston, DC, and Philadelphia. Our first stop was Kleinfeld for wedding dresses!
Why am I sharing this photo when the post is about bridesmaids’ dresses?
Well, I ended up (despite insisting I wanted to buy a dress in Philly) saying YES to a dress at Kleinfeld. I will not be sharing my dress until after the wedding, so you’ll have to wait until May.
The bridemsaids had spoken. No preference on color, but they wanted to pick their own dress style. Fair enough. I was loving all the weddings with “mismatched” dresses.
All the women look comfortable in their chosen dresses—picking designs that best flatter their figures. Isn’t that what everyone wants? My bridesmaids range in height from 5′ to 5′7″ and cover almost every shape and size in between. My maid of honor is on the taller end of this spectrum and, as a tall girl myself, I didn’t want her to be worried about a wardrobe malfunction due to a super-short dress!
So now the challenge was to pick a color as well as find a designer who had multiple styles to choose from (in the same fabric).
So…we have a venue and we have a style…but how to execute?
WARNING: PHOTO-HEAVY POST AHEAD
As I mentioned, with our venue the issue was going to be controlling the vision. With the potential for there to be multiple vendors for the reception design and execution alone, we needed to think about how everything would remain cohesive and not turn into a garbled mess.
We spoke to the Kimmel Center and asked them if they could recommend any vendors who could “do it all.” In other words, were there companies that could help us with everything from flowers to chairs to forks and china? There were (hooray!), and so we decided to narrow it down to two that had done business with the venue and visit them one spring weekend.
I went armed with two things when visiting these vendors:
1. My wedding brand (modern elegance)
2. My binder of wedding inspiration
Oh…and 3. My mom and Mr. Turkey
When asked about the wedding I showed them photos around overall inspiration that I had compiled in my wedding binder, of bridesmaid style, food, and flowers.*
We were looking for them to tell us what could be done and see if they understood what we wanted. A fairly simple conversation, but our thought was that we could tell if there was a good “vibe” between us.
The first stop was Evantine. We had a feeling we would be “WOWed” by this visit, judging by what we had heard about their work and seen on the blog. I mean, check these out:
Place-card table at the Project H.O.M.E. iCare gala (at a private farm) / Image via Evantine Design
I bought dresses for two of my bridesmaids at 8:00 AM inside an abandoned Whole Foods store.
Did that get your attention?
I previously told you about the benefits of living an hour from the J.Crew headquarters in Lynchburg, Virginia. A few months after I bought a pair of shoes for 97% off at one of their wedding clearance sales, J. Crew staged another warehouse sale inside a building that Whole Foods left after they built themselves a new store here in Charlottesville.
By this point, I had decided that I wanted my bridesmaids to wear silk taffeta dresses by J.Crew in Matisse Blue even though it might be difficult to find matching decorative items. I was pretty sure I could find them at the warehouse sale. You see, those Matisse Blue dresses were from the spring/summer collection and weren’t being shown in the fall catalog. I thought they might be sent to the sale to get them out of the warehouse.
Complicating things was the fact that these warehouse sales are where eBay sellers shop for things to sell. I had to get to the dresses before the resellers did. If the resellers got them, I’d have to pay to to three times as much to buy them through eBay.
At 7:45 AM on the opening morning of the sale, my maid of honor and I joined the line of eager shoppers snaked around the building. We reviewed the mission. We had to find these dresses:
Dresses from J.Crew (Discontinued)
The doors opened and everyone was handed a trash bag and price list, then we came around a corner into the shoe section of the sale. Most were like deer in headlights at the sight of rows and rows of tables holding boxes full of shoes. My maid of honor was one of them. I wove through the crowd toward the bridal section as my MOH held up a pair of heels and called “I could wear these!”
I look back at the first time I was a bridesmaid fondly. However, I cringe when I think about how much money I spent. I was just a graduate student, but spent as if I were comfortably installed in a lucrative career. (I was always headed toward a job in academia, so that was especially silly of me.)
I wasn’t really convinced that I would wear any of the bridesmaids’ dresses I’ve bought again. I held on to a couple, but they sat in my closet for years. I finally donated them to the Cinderella Project a few years ago.
When I started to think about my bridesmaids, I wondered whether they might have the cost of the role in mind. I came across this graphic from Mint a while back and posted it in the Weddingbee forums, but it’s so comprehensive that it’s worth posting again.
Check out the original on Mint.com’s blog.
The road to finding the perfect bridesmaids’ dresses was certainly not an easy one. Having a bit of a perfectionist streak, I didn’t really allow for much wiggle room once I had a set vision of what I wanted. As I previously mentioned here, I had my mind set on a more organized version of mismatched dresses. I loved the look of completely individual non-matching dresses, but I did worry about creating a cohesive look. (Remember when I described my active imagination? Well, it was telling me free rein could equal complete and utter chaos.) I thought that an easy compromise would be to find a collection with many options for my ladies to choose from. But when it came down to it, shop after shop left me feeling disappointed and less confident about my decision.
Now for a little backstory that y’all are missing… Long ago when I first started researching options, I found the J.Crew bridesmaids’ dresses online. I immediately liked them, but there wasn’t a J.Crew Bridal Shop in Richmond, and I’ve never really been the type to order clothing online willy-nilly. I wanted to be able to hold them, touch them, feel them, smell them (well, maybe not smell them, but you get the idea). So I pushed the option to the back of my mind and went on my way, visiting every bridal store in town; however, with the passing of every failed appointment, I found myself back at J.Crew’s website admiring the dresses.
L.O.V.E. / Image via Once Wed Photo by Jill Thomas Photography
I didn’t plan on jumping right into inspiration posts, but early in our engagement there was exciting news from one of my favorite brands that just needed to be shared! A few months ago, Kate Spade New York introduced Wedding Belles (and whistles), a collection including dresses, shoes, jewelry, handbags, and other accessories.
How do I love this new collection? Let me count the ways…
I guess it’s first important to discuss my love for this brand. Although I have been (woefully) restrained in purchasing from Kate, I am constantly attracted to her bright colors, polka-dotted patterns, and unique handbags. My shiny pink Stacy wallet is a bright spot in any purse and was so loved that I purchased a coordinating striped pink case for my iPhone. (I was going through a pink phase at the time.) So though my Kate collection is fairly limited beyond this, I have spent countless hours on their site, many times going as far as placing items in the basket before I stop, close the browser, and sadly walk away.
But if there’s one time to splurge a little…it’s your wedding, right? So here’s my current “love” wish list from the Wedding Belles collection.
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