Days to go: 66

Some­times — moth­ers do know best.

I spent hours brows­ing the inter­net for dress ideas and inspi­ra­tion. I spent a lot of time in a bit of a cri­sis — I didn’t like most dresses — and I couldn’t imag­ine myself wear­ing any kind of wed­ding dress. Like, ever.

When I dis­cov­ered the cre­ations of Ian Stu­art, how­ever, I began to believe I could wear a wed­ding dress. (And inter­est­ingly enough, most of his dresses seemed to go very well with my Irreg­u­lar Choice shoes!) I spent yet more hours por­ing over every Ian Stu­art design I could find, over and over again, try­ing to imag­ine myself in each and every dress.

I felt very proud of myself when I thought I’d picked out the per­fect selec­tion of three dresses to try on:

Very luck­ily, a shop down the road from me stocked Ian Stu­art dresses, Fairy­tale Brides (sounds very unlike me but ignore the name and con­cen­trate on the dresses I thought…) and so I made an appoint­ment to try on those three dresses. I was con­vinced Seville was the dress for me by this point, but kept the other two in the run­ning just to make sure.

I went to the dress shop with my mum, Richard’s mum, and Kather­ine. There I was, ready to try on my Seville dress and be done with it and tick the dress part off the list.

Straight away, upon arrival, the moth­ers noticed how nice the dress was on the man­nequin in the win­dow and urged me to try it on. This dress was com­pletely NOT what I had in mind — and quite specif­i­cally not as it had a cer­tain detail on that I always cringed at on pho­tographs I’d seen online — but I thought I’d humour them and try it on first and get it out of the way.

But there it was. My dress. Absolutely per­fect in so many ways. (And the shop sam­ple was a strangely per­fect fit too!) And it went per­fectly with my shoes.

I tried the other three dresses on just to make sure (and had to travel to the other Fairy­tale Brides a lit­tle drive away to try on the Seville) and they did absolutely noth­ing for me. Noth­ing. I couldn’t believe that both my moth­ers had found the per­fect dress for me that I had pre­vi­ously over­looked. (It didn’t help that pho­tos online didn’t do this dress jus­tice — most of the mod­els had no curves and this dress needs curves!)

I found my dress straight away — the first wed­ding dress I EVER tried on. I wish I’d taken time to exper­i­ment and try on more — but I’m con­fi­dent it is the one for me — and my new brides­maid dresses make my dress look even bet­ter! I’m going to fol­low Sally’s exam­ple and leave you won­der­ing until after the big day though. You’ve only got 66 days to wait.

So three lessons from this post:

1. Dresses always look dif­fer­ent in real life.

Don’t spend all your time (like I did) brows­ing for dresses online. Go forth to the shops and try try try! I totally wish I’d tried more on!

2. Don’t be afraid to throw away all your care­fully planned head-ideas and go with your heart.

You may have a solid idea about what dress you want — but it may not suit your style/shape/colouring. My advice would be — don’t plan! Just go and try on loads of dresses!

3. Moth­ers know best!

I didn’t think my mum would know me bet­ter than I know myself. But I was wrong. Love you, mum!