Married, twice

Yup, I've now officially married the same man twice, and I have the paperwork to prove it :-)
I have to say the second wedding was just amazing! I loved what my sister-in-law had done with the venue, I loved the foods, I loved the cake, I loved the party, I loved my dress and I love my husband. Everything turned out so great and lots of people came who I didn't expect to drive such a long way to Middle of Nowhere. My former roommates drove 7 hours just to be there and I really appreciated it!

I haven't yet gone through the professional photos, but here are some my bridesmaid took.

The venue in progress, which really was just your everyday town dance hall and looked like any old barn from the outside. My sister-in-law did wonders to the place, for example covering the ugly ceiling with sheets and hanging ornaments. This was taken the night before and we were still decorating it, but it gives some idea what the venue would look like. I'll post more detailed photos later.

Getting my nails done :) I usually just have gel polish on my natural nails, but of course I had a massive nail disaster while traveling and lost several nails (can you imagine! ;), so I had to get acrylics. They looked great for the wedding, but I broke one of them a few days later, shucks.

My hair in progress... I looked like Shirley Temple :) I got my hair dyed a bit darker for the wedding and I think it looked great!

Wedding hair all done! I had some red and clear rhinestones in my hair, but decided against the tiara. I also ended up getting new jewelry, I'll post pics later.

and here's the dress! I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out, but it was amazing! The silver color was just what I wanted and it was a perfect fit for our Christmas/Winter wonderland theme. I'll post some better pics of it later as well.

I can't believe it's almost Christmas! Hope everyone has their holiday spirits on! :)

Wedding dress from China - Confessions of an online-shopaholic, pt II

Our first wedding was organized with a very small budget, since my husband was unemployed and I'm a student/homemaker. The budget for my wedding dress was super-small as well. Most store-sold dressed here in Finland were wayyyy too expensive. To make things worse I have a very annoying body shape (wide hips, very narrow waist, broader shoulders), which means most store-sold dresses would have to be altered and I would end up spending even more money. While in the U.S I bought one wedding dress online through Amazon and the dress itself was gorgeous. The problem was again that I would have had to have it altered to fit my small-ish waist. I ended up selling the dress when I got to Finland. After that I decided to get a custom made dress to solve this problem. Considering the minuscule budget, I basically had no choice, but to order my wedding dress from China.

I had my doubts about ordering a wedding dress from China: would it be the right size, would it be like the description/photo, would it be acceptable quality, would my credit card be charged more than promised, would the dress ever even arrive? Those were the obvious questions. The other things I wondered were if it was ethically responsible to order the wedding dress from China, when I have no idea who made it? I pondered this for quite some time until I had to accept the fact that I never really know who makes the clothes I wear, unless I have them made at a local shop and even then I don't know who made the fabric etc.

Next step was to search a good site to order the dress from. I read a ton of reviews and looked at even more photos of gorgeous dresses. Based on the dresses, the reviews and the price I finally chose Lilywedding.com. And I wasn't disappointed; the dress was gorgeous, just the right size and the best part was it totally fit my budget! For the price of little over $200 I got the custom made dress, a pretty veil, an okay two-hoop petticoat and all this delivered to my door on time. All in all a very good experience! The only slightly negative thing was that Lilywedding forgot to add the spaghetti straps I asked for, but they did send them in a letter afterwards. The original dress did not have straps. I actually ended up not using the straps since the dress was just perfect without them!

The dress on Lilywedding.com

And on me :)

I've also ordered some cocktail dresses from dinodirect.com, which is even cheaper. They have a ton of different wedding and other dresses, some of them custom made. The three dresses I've ordered have been good for the price, but the quality hasn't been as good as Lilywedding. For example one the dresses was way too big and didn't have a lace-up back as promised, but a zipper. The two other dresses have been great, but not exactly as in the description/photo. But like I said, for the price they have been awesome. Also, dinodirect.com delivers really fast. All my dresses were here in less than a month from when I ordered them!

I just ordered a dress for our second wedding (the first one was in Finland and the second one will be in the U.S) and this time I used 1luckybride.com. Judging from the reviews they seemed to be pretty good at delivering what they promised. I guess I'll find out in two months :)