dream dress

I've never really been that girl that spent a lot of time daydreaming about what her wedding would be like. I like flowers, but to me, for the most part, flowers are flowers. I don't care about napkins, or place settings. I didn't go crazy buying bridal magazines the minute I got engaged, in fact I never bought any at all. I knew at some point that I would need to get a wedding dress, and had even tried on a few, but to be honest, they were all kind of the same to me. All of them were white, and beautiful, any of them could have been my wedding dress and any of them would have worked just fine. I guess that's how I knew I hadn't found the right dress yet.

I did use Pinterest to keep ideas I liked for the wedding together, and one day I was looking around on the site, and I found this picture:

 

 
It was over for me at that point, I knew that this was going to be my dress. I don't even know what it was exactly about it, it is obviously a gorgeous dress, but the woman wearing it in this picture is so stunning that she could have been wearing a brown paper bag and looked amazing. There was no link on the picture, no description, nothing, but I knew I had to find out who made this dress.
 

Thus began my exhaustive search. I tried google, tried writing to bridal magazine editors and woman's magazine editors, tried twitter and facebook, I commented on the picture on Pinterest and tried to get more information from other pinners. A couple of months went by and I didn't have any leads. I had been to another bridal salon and tried to find something similar, but there was nothing even remotely close to the amazingness that was that dress.

Then one day, I got a Pinterest notification that someone had commented on my photo. The commenter told me that the dress I was seeking was Romona Keveza (who is a Canadian designer, whooo). After more research, I realized that the dress was a few seasons old, and even if I happened to find it, it was thousands of dollars. I've always been the girl that watched an episode of "Say Yes to the Dress" and couldn't believe that the wedding dresses STARTED at $2,000, and even though I loved this dress, I knew I wouldn't be able to pay that kind of money for a dress I would only wear once, especially with all of the other expenses of the wedding, and the house that we were in the process of buying.
 

Soon after, I happened to come across the website Recycled Bride, where women sell their used wedding dresses and other wedding accessories. I was so excited to see that not only was there a woman selling the dress I wanted for only $1,300 (which I realize is still a lot more than some people could afford to spend on a dress, but it was only a fraction of the original cost) in my size. I was so excited, but also very nervous because I wouldn't be able to try the dress on before I bought it, and even though it SHOULD have fit according to the size, all designers are different.
 

Also, the woman was selling it from Virginia, and I had no way of knowing whether I would actually get the dress, or if it was some scheme designed to rip off girls who had fallen in love with this same Pinterest picture.
 

I mulled it over for a few days, and exchanged a few emails with Lindsey, the seller. A few people told me not to do it, that it was too risky, but for some reason I just KNEW that this was my dress, and that if I went ahead and got it, it would all work out fine. I also knew that no other dress would be able to live up to this one after all of the work I had put into finding it, and that I would always wonder about it if I decided not to get it.
 

I wired Lindsey the money, and a week later, the dress was mine. It was a little bit big in the hips, but I was able to get it taken in, and it really was my dream dress, I would have it on every single day if I could pee without help and fit into a bus seat while wearing it. So I guess the moral of that story is, if you absolutely refuse to give up on something, and you have a little faith in people, you can sometimes get exactly what you want.