finding the perfect dress

well, that title is a little funny for my situation because luckily, i don't actually have to find the perfect dress. a dear family friend has offered to make a gown for me. she is an excellent seamstress, and i know all i'll have to do is show her a picture of what i want and she'll whip it up.

now, the real question is...what do i want? when i decided on cupcakes instead of a traditional wedding cake, i immediately took the formality notch down a few levels. i also am not a fan of big, poofy cinderella dresses. another thing that accentuates the simplicity of my ideas is my ring--no center stone, just a simple row of diamonds. when i started my "dress" search for ideas of what i wanted, here is what i came up with.

first dress i loved, courtesy of Stephanie Williams, a photographer who did a killer vintage shoot that can be found here: part 1 part 2



and another dress from the same shoot that is beautiful and simple. i looove the detail on the bodice.
p.s. amazing lighting on this next image, no?



so, using these ideas, i went to brides.com to continue my search and found these beauties. (note, only a smattering of my favorites...i had so many more, but narrowed it down to these, for you.)





and finally this one.

which i immediately fell in love with. i will admit that part of me loves the dress because of the beautiful photograph in which it appears, but i also LOVE the dress--lacy, vintage, modest, etc. etc. the caption describes this dress as an "Alençon lace tea-length dress with a scalloped hemline..., $4,600, by Ulla-Maija Couture, ulla-maija.com". so i scoured ulla-maija.com to see if i could indeed find this beautiful dress or something even like it. to no avail. i found one similar on a blog that lifted an image from your dream dress,

but everything else i found was brides that LOVED this dress and couldn't find anything like it anywhere! so, i emailed the picture to my seamstress, and this was her reply:

"OHH pretty dress. We can totally make something like this...we can do the dress for much, much cheaper!!"

lucky me! thanks, steph!