One dress, two dress, three dress, four.

Sorry I have been so absent from the blog! I spent some quality time at home in Michigan and then in Miami. In Michigan, we got tons of wedding stuff done!

Something I was really excited to do in MI was to hang out with Colby and Rachel and go pick out bridesmaid dresses. Everyone in my wedding party has different taste so I decided to choose a designer, fabric and color and then let the girls pick out their own dress.

We started off at Brides by Demetrios in Troy where I purchased my wedding dress. I tried it on so my future mother in-law could see it in person and so I could see how awesome my shoes looked with my dress. Trust me, it looks awesome. Demetrios carried a few bridesmaid lines I was interested: Dessy and Alfred Sung. We started with the Dessy chiffon dresses, which was a good place to start. Rachel walked out first in this dress, which looked like it was meant for her (minus the shockingly bright yellow color).

Colby also found a few numbers that she looked super in! After seeing the color swatches, I liked the idea of these dresses being in charcoal gray.

Then, we moved on to Alfred Sung.

Sorry for the purple splotch on the pic. I am in the pic wearing my wedding dress and I am keeping it a secret because I like the idea of keeping it a secret! I will give you a hint... it is white...whitish.)

These dresses have a more shiny appearance and came off very “little girlish” and too “bridesmaidy”. Yes, bridesmaidy is a word. It was obvious very quickly, that these dresses clashed with my dress style. Mom, future Mom in-law, Colby, Rachel and I all voted these down.

We had some lunch and moved to a dress shop that shall remain nameless. This shop was horrible. Although they had a large selection of dress, the shop was dirty looking and the staff was not particularly helpful. At Demetrios, the saleswoman was super helpful and pulled all of our dresses for us. And on top of those minor things wrong with the nameless shop, when we first arrived, there was another bride upset because the shop had suggested to her to order a size that was completely wrong. The bride could not fit into her dress and the shop refused to take responsibility. Even more so, after the bride left, the sales staff continued to talk badly about the bride right in front of us. So. Be careful, about who you decide to work with! Sometimes it is worth spending a little bit more to go to a nicer shop.

All of that didn’t really matter since I planned on ordering the bridesmaid dresses online from frenchnovelty.com. It has amazing prices and if you want they will make sure all of your dresses come from the same dye lot. Knowing that we were just there to look, we checked out some Bill Levkoff dresses.

These dresses also came in a beautiful charcoal gray color.

I felt really good about bridesmaid dresses at this point. Plus, we ended the day seeing our other friend, Bridesmaid Lisa, and the adorable baby Lucy.

What do you think? You like the easy breezy chiffon dresses?

Dressing the maids

So, I had to introduce the maids because we are going to talk FASHION.

Next week, I will be going with two of my lovely maids, Colby and Rachel, plus the moms to look at some dresses for them. Thus, I have to get a more concrete idea of what I would like them to wear. And Josh, no, you will not be wearing a dress.

Since our wedding isn’t going to be super formal (cocktail attire) I would like the ladies to have knee length dresses. I honestly don’t want them to look stupid although it is tempting to make them wear something like this:

Ha! I have looked through 1,000 bridesmaid dress pics. And, it seems we could go a few different ways. First, I could pick one dress and make all of them wear it because I am a bridezilla.;;">

After Six, From Dessy.com

But, that seems unappealing because all my ladies are different. I love them for their differences so why not play that up? They could all wear a similar dress in the same color and fabric. I would then let them pick the style and whatever shoes and jewelry they wanted.

Alfred Sung, all from Dessy.com

Or, I could give them some rules and then send them out to pick out their own dress so it would hopefully end up something like this:

From greenweddingshoes.com

I like, but I have heard from other brides that their bridesmaids hated this third option. It seemed that it puts a lot of pressure on the girls to go hunting for a dress that fit the style and color scheme of the wedding… and who has the time to do that when it isn’t your own wedding. So, I am leaning toward option 2. I would like it if the dresses were gray/pewter so that their purple flowers would pop against their dresses. But I am open to purple dresses, too. We’ll see what happens!

What do you think I should do? What did you do for your wedding?