Last night I was talking to Jarrod’s mom, and she asked me what I was going to write today’s blog about.

“Well,” I began, “I don’t really know. But I guess I haven’t really talked about how I found my wedding dress…which is kind of important!”

Wedding dress shopping was, at first, exciting. In fact, one of the first things I did after Jarrod proposed was spend hours online poring over wedding dress websites. This is actually how I found PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com!

I’m what you would call, euphemistically, a “budget bride”. That is, if there is any way to save money in my wedding, I will jump on it. Painting my own cake toppers? Okay! Sewing the bridesmaid dresses from a pattern? Great! So it was only natural that I would look for ways to save on my wedding dress.

The wedding dress market is, in my opinion, one big scam. Honestly. I shake my head in disappointment! I’m just not going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars on a dress that I’ll wear for eight hours, tops. What would I do with it when I the wedding was done? Save it for my daughter only to have her laugh in my face at the prospect of wearing an incredibly outdated and yellowed dress? Or I could sell it on a wedding dress resale website, such as the one you are reading, for savvy brides-to-be such as yourself to snap up excitedly.

Another disappointment to me is the styles these days. Again, not meaning to offend anyone, but most of the dresses I see out there are horrid! I’m not of the cupcake dress-loving hoards. I’m just thoroughly disappointed in 99 of every 100 wedding dresses that I see. And it’s not like sewing my dress myself is an option. I am not exactly a great seamstress, and I would end up angry and frustrated at the mess that my hands produce.

Four retailers caught my eye though: Jenny Yoo, J Crew, Nicole Miller, and Thread Design. Here are some pictures of favorite dresses from the three, so you can get a sense for my wedding dress style: very simple, flowy, outdoorsy. Which will actually be kind of interesting, because Jarrod is planning on wearing a tuxedo. Eh, we’ll pull it off!

I also really liked this dress from David’s Bridal, but when I tried it on, it was way too low-cut for my tastes (okay, I’ll admit it—I’m mildly stodgy when it comes to clothing styles).

Another huge thing that attracted me to each of these retailers was the price: very affordable, and also very high quality. They understand that nice dresses don’t have to come with not-nice price tags, and I liked that.

Well, I’ve reached a stopping point in the saga. Next week I’ll tell you about my trip to Chicago to try on dresses.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Emily's Bride Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.