Dress, Offered XII

So you guys know Drea, right? She writes at The Maiden Metallurgist, and she was a wedding grad years ago (God, I still love her wedding), and last summer wrote a really brave post about what she learned about her marriage when she learned she couldn’t get pregnant. And then she got pregnant. (See the theme today?) And she’s having a baby… now-ish. But first, she has one little piece of business to take care of. She needs to pass on her size 6 wedding dress. A wedding dress that I love, and that Drea loves, and is the sassiest dress ever. And I really want it to find a good home. So if that home is you, leave a comment as to why you’d like it, and Drea will pick. The usual rules apply.

I have been a big fan of A Practical Wedding since 2008 when I was planning my own wedding. I found it one night when I was frustrated with all the typical wedding websites and started googling “different weddings,”  “budget weddings,” “nontraditional weddings,” and finally “practical weddings.” It was such a boon to find some like-minded people talking about weddings in a different way- being honest about how maybe the tablecloths and the favors and the flowers don’t matter; the marriage matters. It was this value, found here at APW that kept me reading long after the wedding was over.

When Meg did her first dress giveaway, I was delighted, and I thought how much I’d love to give my dress away. Then little voices in my brain started saying things like “but it’s your wedding dress” and “it is pretty casual, you can wear it again, in fact I’m sure you will” and finally “I doubt anyone would want it anyway.” The thing is, it was my wedding dress, it was so fun and pretty and so unlike anything I can ever imagine wearing anywhere else. The only places my husband and I go where I would even get this dressed up are other people’s weddings and how gauche would it be to wear your wedding dress to another wedding? I cringe just thinking about that. Also, shouldn’t I let someone else decide if they want it or not? I wanted it, I loved it. I still do. Maybe someone else will love it too.

So I decided to give it away here on APW, but then… well I never pulled the trigger. Wedding dresses are just things, but they are sentimental things and as such, hard to let go of. This dress has been cleaned and hanging in the guest room closet for over two years. Truth be told, for a while I forgot all about it. Until…

Well, despite being told that we couldn’t, we’re having a baby. Soon. We are moving stuff around and cleaning out closets and there it still is, hanging useless. It is funny, I feel like I have everything I could ever ask for and suddenly that pretty dress is just that. A pretty dress. One that is doing me no good hanging in the closet. I’m never going to wear it again. So after 25 months, I discovered I was ready to pull the trigger.

Now let me tell you about my dress. The first dress I bought for our wedding was a fantastic retro purple number from an indie shop that I took to a very reputable tailor for alterations. I was set to pick it up a week before the wedding, and when I did I was in a bit of a panic to discover that it did not fit. At all. I couldn’t even zip it up. Even the seamstress, this complete stranger told me not to wear it to my wedding. Well duh. I sent out some panicked text messages to friends asking for any suggestions and out of desperation found myself at David’s Bridal digging through the $99 dollar racks looking for something I could possibly imagine wearing.

One of their sales people found me desperately wincing at dress after dress and suggested I make an appointment. I started to tell her I didn’t have enough time to make an appointment and ended up kind of freaking out about my dress and the alterations and OMG-the-wedding-is-in-6-days-and-I-don’t-know-what-to-do…  and she immediately shifted into some sort of DB turbo mode, she started asking about the wedding and pulling dresses and trying to figure out what we could do in only 6 days.

Unfortunately, despite the sales woman of the year’s amazing attitude, none of the big white meringues I tried on felt in any way authentic. Dejected, I was about to leave when I started browsing the bridesmaid/Mother of the bride/prom section. I found this dress, a MOB dress and thought, what the hell? I zipped it up and breathed a sigh of relief. I was so happy to find it, I bought it on the spot. It fit perfectly, no alterations needed. I think if I’d found it before my original purple dress I would have bought it instead, but I never would have found it, because I never would have been in DB to begin with. It just goes to show you; I know David’s Bridal is oft maligned by indie brides and the hip wedding blogs, but they saved the day for me, and I will never speak a negative word about them.

So here are the details. It is a DB size 6, no alterations have been done. It originally cost about $150, so it is no way a designer steal, just a dress, maybe the dress for you.

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