Everybody looks utterly beautiful! I should not be doing this with the amount of work I have but I had to join in the fun.

Jean, you look like you stepped out of one my fairytale storybooks from my childhood. It is perfect, for the occasion and for you.

shiny, gotta love a bride with uggs on. You guys are a wonderful couple.

Brianna, that color is prefect for you. Gorgeous!

Bella, yay, how wonderful to see your pretty face. Such a beautiful bride!

Sarah, so classic & timeless, so YOU!

Ana, I love that you had such an intimate wedding. And to be able to wear the skirt made by your grandma, that is just beyond perfect.

cciele, My not so secret desire was to have an intimate destination wedding. But our families would never have been able to digest that! Simple lovely.

anne, you were such a radiant bride! Beautiful

kimlee, I love that you are laughing and smiling all the way. And I love the color combo of your dress.

Alecia, beautiful. I love the corset bodice (my wedding dress terminology is terrible).

Here is mine. It was an out and out traditional Indian affair and so is my wedding "dress". The photographer was making me stand and angle my head in weird poses:

http://s273.photobucket.com/al.....5178_o.jpg

Back:
http://s273.photobucket.com/al.....38_o-1.jpg

Henna hands:
http://s273.photobucket.com/al.....8077_o.jpg

Closeup:
http://s273.photobucket.com/al.....title2.jpg

I had to change for the second half:
http://s273.photobucket.com/al.....C_0612.jpg

Wow! I love them all! Everyone really looks amazing.

My search for the dress inspired the book I am writing - about being a "late in life bride." I was 46 when I got married (first time), and I really struggled with what to wear. I realized that, much to my surprise, I wanted to look like a traditional bride. I can see how much my face has aged in the last six years! (NOT because of the marriage - just normal aging!)

http://i387.photobucket.com/al.....Road_2.jpg

By the way - I had NO idea what I was doing with that veil! I didn't have any attendants, so I just sort of threw it up there and hoped for the best! It looks a bit odd, but it was fun to wear.

Niva, What a beauty!! I am loving all the pattern, color and textures.
Tarzy , I just saw how beautiful you look!! I was also married later, I was 49!!Hubby was 52
I love this post, you have all shared such beautiful memories and stories. I love both the casual, traditional and somewhere in between variety of all of our wedding days.
Sinead, to answer your question, one of the first dates I went on with my husband was to see a bad production of Camelot. Even though the play was awful, we both loved the story and rented the movie a zillion times. I loved Vanessa Redgrave's costumes, particularly the colors that they chose for her red hair. That was the inspiration for the design. Because we were both older and both artists, we did not want anything about our wedding to be too traditional. My husband is an actor and wore the costume that he uses when he does a one man show as Nathanial Hawthorne. He is very theatrical! The whole evening was like being in another time, very romantic.
Our photographer was an artist and we did not have any traditional shots which I sort of regret. This is the first one you saw:
http://i41.photobucket.com/alb.....d002_1.jpg
Here are a few more:
A friend took this:
http://i41.photobucket.com/alb.....ntview.jpg
This is a shot of my bouquet::
http://i41.photobucket.com/alb.....ouquet.jpg

(It always makes me smile at how enthused and proud woman are to share their wedding day memories. Obviously it’s a blessedly magical day for most and it shines through). I LOVE weddings.

Ana, that’s an utterly fabulous story. Joy, great story too. One of the best weddings I have ever been to was on a shoe string budget. Food for thought.

Violet happy 10th anniversary!

Cc, Alecia, Kimlee, Anne you were all gorgeous brides!

Vani, Indian weddings give me goose bumps. SO, SO, SO beautiful.

Tara, you look like a bride from the Buchanan estate in the Great Gatsby. AMAZING.

Shiny is right, we have a group of nontraditional brides and a group of traditional brides. So fab.

Greg and I are heading for our 13th wedding anniversary in Dec and have been together for 22 years. Time flies.

Jean, your dress is beautiful. It is something I can imagine a fairytale princess wearing.

shiny, I love your dress and got a great chuckle out of the uggs.

Brianna, gorgeous!

Bella, love the picture of you and your hubby. You both look so happy!

Sarah, I love the details on your dress.

Ana, there is something very sweet about wearing the skirt that your grandmother made for you. You were surrounded by those you love which always makes for a perfect wedding.

cciele, I can not decide which is more breathe taking, your dress, or the view.

anne, you dress looks so pretty. I think of prim and proper when I look at your dress. It suits you!

Alecia, the details on your dress make it super.

Joy, I am chuckling over your story. When I went dress shopping I made sure that my dress did not make me look pregnant. Since M and I had dated just 8 months before becoming engaged, and had a short engagement I was worried that the local gossip would take the story and run with it.

Niva, you look stunning. I have always admired the traditional Indian weddings and the amazing clothing you wear.

Tarzy, you look like a very traditional bride, and the veil looks perfect. Sometimes not planning something produces the best result.

Jean - I'm thinking about perhaps including some other older brides' stories in my book. Would you be interested? I haven't worked it all out yet - I would probably write a series of questions, and maybe intersperse quotes from other brides throughout the book. Please e-mail me if you think you might be interested! tarzucker at yahoo dot com. (All participants will be anonymous.)

This is such a fun thread and everyone's pictures and stories are great. We are coming up on 15 years of marriage later this month. I actually dug through and found some picture to scan this morning, but I can't get my printer to do it. I will have my IT guy (ie husband) help me tonight and see if we can get it done.

Wanted to add a picture of the cover of our invitation. It was a painting that I did of a wedding dress several years ago. I bought the dress in Filene's Basement for 50.00 to use as a prop for a painting:
http://i41.photobucket.com/alb.....rint04.jpg
Obviously not my dress.
Loving seeing all of your photos and hearing stories,
keep them coming!!

What a gorgeous painting Jean!!! I love that. The shadows are amazing!

I looked for a picture of myself when I got married to my kids father in 1973. I was 18 and made my own dress. I did not go for the white wedding gown, I went for a green with pink flowers on it. I thought it would be fun to post a picture of me at 18 but I guess that photo album must be up in the attic.

I also made a lace wedding gown for another bride She loved it. I have made a couple other wedding dresses too that were not the traditional white. I love wedding dresses. Fun thread.

Jean, I looove the Camelot with Vanessa Redgrave- I can totally see its inspiration in your dress. Thank you so much for posting more photos. Beyond beautiful.

My son thinks I've lost my mind because I've been going through these postings oohing and aahing and yelling 'gorgeous'. Thank you all for sharing these.

Thank you all so much for sharing your pictures. This is so much fun!

Ok, I managed to get mine scanned. Like I said, we are coming up on our 15 year anniversary in a few weeks, and I think I am just about this size/weight again.
close up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/c.....617669017/
Full Length:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/c.....617669029/
Here is a very cool picture that I found online of the park that we were married in taken from above:
http://tinyurl.com/meas8g
The day that we were married, that grassy area inside the amphitheater of trees (which is where the ceremony was) was bloomming with flowers. My husband took me here for one of our first dates, and I told him then that I wanted to get married there- although I was not thinking that it would be to him at that time.

Chewy,
What a beautiful dress and congrats on the weight loss. I love the neckline and the daisies are so unique and fresh, perfect with the dress!! What a sensational place to get married!
Thanks for sharing!!!

I love love love this thread! I can't tell you all how much I am smiling looking at all your pics. You are all so beautiful! I loved reading all the little details in your individual stories. What a great idea for this thread Jean!

Here is a pic from my wedding day. It's a sari I fell in love with a year before I got married (and a couple of weeks before I met my DH-to-be). It was so impractical for my lifestyle to get it, but my mom saw how much I loved it and got it for me anyway, joking with me that it could be my wedding sari. Little did I know it would be, just over a year later!

http://i557.photobucket.com/al.....G32333.jpg

Wow, what a fun thread! All of you ladies look absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, I don't have any digital pics from my three (!) weddings (10+ years ago). One of these days I will get around to scanning them!

My first wedding was a civil ceremony although we did convince the judge to take us to an outdoor location rather than inside the courthouse. I wore a cream crochet short sleeved sweater over a cami paired with cream silk trousers. For the second I wore a traditional wedding dress (silk with a an A-line skirt, short train and embroidered daisies at the hem) and for the third, I did a traditional Indian sari in dark orange with lots and lots of gold!

This is such a fun thread. I love everyone's dresses. The saris are just so wonderful. I don't know about traditional Indian weddings. Niva, what is the colorful arrangement in your hair? I've not seen that before. (You see it in the picture with the back of your dress.)

Jean: What a great thread! I can't believe you designed your own dress! You look so beautiful and unique!

It was amazing to see everyone in their wedding dresses! I'm stunned how beautiful the traditional Indian saris are and the white dresses are always graceful!

I'm a romantic when it comes to weddings so we went with the traditional theme in an old ottoman mansion on Bosphorus, Istanbul. I'm so glad we did what we did looking back five years later. The theme of our wedding was pearls... (surprising?!?)... We had to come down the stairs three floors as our guests watched us so I chose a dress with three tiered lace with pearls sprinkled around the hems and the veil.

Here are some shots... and yes I had some hair back then.

http://s581.photobucket.com/al.....G_0174.jpg

I thought it would be fun to revive this thread after Angie's post today. Please post your wedding gown pictures if you haven't already. I realized that my link has expired so I will re-post my pictures as well.

Beth mentioned in the wedding ring thread that she was inspired to start a wedding dress thread. I remembered that we had such a thread and dug it up. It seems like I tried to revive this thread once before but there wasn't a lot of interest.
I hope that we get more responses this time. I love seeing wedding gowns! Actually, I just went through all the links in this thread and admired everyone's dresses once again. I realize that some links are dead (including mine). I will try to locate a picture on my laptop and post shortly. In the meantime, please post away!

Bella, thank you! I don't know how I missed it the first time. :O

OK, I'll add mine:

I got mine at Barney's. It's Marc by Marc Jacobs. We were married on a farm on Whidbey Island, and I wanted a dress I could wear again. At the time this was the most expensive dress I'd every purchased! While I suppose that's quite normal for a wedding dress, mine was in the (low) hundreds, not thousands. (-:

This pic was taken in my old studio apartment weeks before the wedding.

This was fun to look through, everyone has such lovely dresses!

Here's mine! It had a mermaid silhouette with lots of silky meshy lower layers which were all embroidered with flowers (you can see them in #5); the bust was heavily embroidered in a similar pattern (#2/4). The top section parted asymmetrically (#1) and was gathered in a little embroidered bunch at the hip (#2). The back was laced up with ribbon (#3), and when bustled the lower layers slipped under the pointed hem.

EDIT: Hubby is wearing a handmade silk tie my folks bought him in Syria. It's black with green and gold thread embroidery, with a star arabesque pattern similar to this.

I love looking at wedding dresses! I worked at a bridal salon in college and I loved getting to play dress up every day (with my customers, mostly, of course but I also happened to be the size that most of our samples came in so they always put me in all the new dresses as they came in so we knew what we had). My dress actually came from the store I worked at but it closed shortly after it came in so the store seamstress finished the alterations (just a bustle) and then I had to store it across the top of my mom's headboard/wall-o-cabinets for almost a year!

I don't remember the designer, but it was ivory matte satin with silver embroidery and my mom made two Swarovski crystal headpieces, one we attached to the veil and one I wore under for after the ceremony.

The last picture is my sisters and I; (my SIL was also a bridesmaid) my mom made the bridesmaids' dresses. The sister on the left works at Disney World now and the sister on the right is a glass blower and just grew out a fauxhawk.

OMG, this is so amazing to see your pictures and read your stories. I don't have any of mine scanned in and they are all in a box somewhere that I can't access right now. I had a traidtional western bride's dress and my bridesmaids were in traditional Indian outfits. DH and the guys work high top converse with the tuxes and I wore high heeled sneakers under my dress. It was a blast.

Oh, I hadn't seen this thread originally, what fun. I don't think I have any wedding pictures scanned, but I'll try to do one sometime.

My mom and I made my dress, with the help of a friend of hers. The skirt fabric was from her wedding dress (there was no way I was going to fit in her dress), covered in some new lace, with a new bodice. It was actually two pieces, a top and a skirt. It had a scoop neck, and three-quarter length sleeves. One of the big reasons we made the dress was that I couldn't find *any* wedding dresses with sleeves in the store (still boggles my mind). I'm not particularly conservative; I just don't think sleeveless or strapless are my best looks. (I would have frozen in one anyway - we were married on the northern California coast in May.)

I look at the pictures now, now that I've been sewing for a while longer, and the fit in the bodice really bugs me - I should have started with a smaller size and done a full bust adjustment. But the fabric was lovely and I think the overall look was successful.

I've loved reading through this thread! The pics are amazing, and it's lovely reading the stories too.

I attached some pics of our wedding day when I first joined, but here are a few more. Because of our differing backgrounds, we had great fun mixing up traditions; I wore a traditional subcontinental lengha (top and long skirt with veil) while hubby wore a traditional western morning suit. The last photo is one of my favourite ones of us together.

Love this thread! Here's mine - a cocktail-party soiree, renting out our favorite restaurant with our 40 best friends and an open bar, open mic, skits, raffle for costumes, hotel accommodations for all, and a hangover-barbecue the next day. My husband found his fly retro micro-check suit at a thrift store!

some of my favorite pictures.