My favourite moment in a wedding is the bit when the bride first comes into the church to walk down the aisle and everyone turns around and looks. When she comes in I always look at the groom to see his face, when he sees his wife to be for the first time, floating down the aisle on a cloud! Being a romantic girl at heart I love this moment, because his face is so emotional and genuine and real! Ahhhh…..

As a result of this unnecessary pressure I had placed upon myself to create ‘the look’ from my own husband to be, when I got engaged I started thinking about my dress straight away. Now, I am not a meringue kind of girl. As lovely as those big dresses are, I just wouldn’t look right in one. I want a dress that fits my personality and that makes me look like a ‘floating on a cloud’ version of myself!

Confession: A couple of years ago, when I was bored and redundant and had no money and it was snowing outside, my silliest friend (who is now my silliest bridesmaid) came over and we spent the afternoon looking for wedding dresses online, picking out our dream dress if we ever got engaged. I realise that this isn’t normal behaviour but we had watched so many episodes of Jeremy Kyle by this point that our minds were on another level…

Anyway, we stumbled upon a designer called Claire Pettibone who we loved so much, we spent the next hour going through the whole catwalk and looking at all her amazing gowns. They are truly works of art. My favourite was a strapless floaty number with a bow called Larissa.

Here are some examples of her dresses…Larissa is on the left (dreamy sigh..).  Images are copyright Claire Pettibone.

When I got engaged the first thing that my friend said was ‘OMG. Are you going to get one of Claire’s gowns?!’ (notice that by this point we had talked about them so much that we are simply referring to her a ‘Claire’, as if we know her and she was our best mate)!.

Of course, I had already sought out where she was stocked (Blackburn Bridal Couture), and had got on the phone to them straight away and booked an appointment. My silliest bridesmaid was coming with me, and I’m not exaggerating, we were beyond excited.

There was one catch.

As beautiful as her dresses are, they were outside my budget. I can totally understand why they are so much, as the detail on them is staggering. But I just don’t have that kind of cash without cutting back on other things, and as much as I love those dresses, I also want people to have an amazing time, and as much as I try and justify it, I had to admit it might not happen.

But there was hope. It turns out Larissa was just inside my budget.   Hurrah! Blackburn Bridal is a very fabulous shop and I had to wait for 5 weeks for my appointment, so in the meantime I decided to go to as many other shops as possible and try on other dresses to see if there was any others I liked. Lets face it, I hadn’t even looked!

So, with my appointments set, for 3 weekends in a row, I set out to find ‘the one’!

To be continued…..

Emma xxx