The Dress

I love wedding dress shopping!  I used to tell people that the dress was by far the most important part of the wedding, even more important than the groom.  I didn't REALLY mean that of course, but the dress is nonetheless the part of the wedding I have the most fun with, and having the perfect dress is really important to me.  I'll write later about my long search for the perfect gown, but for now I need your advice because I think I have found my dress!

For a long time, I was pretty sure that I wanted this dress:

 

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I love the pick-ups, but the thing I really like about this dress is that it also has beading on the trim and has a beautiful train which set it apart from a lot of similar dresses I tried on.  I also really like the style of the beading on the bodice, and the sweetheart neckline really works for me.  The above picture really doesn't do it justice, especially with the gauze thing around her neck.  It looks a lot more impressive in person.  Anyway, I love that dress, but I keep coming back to this one:

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I love that this dress is princessy and has pickups, but it's also unique in that it has a lot of beading in the front and back as well. And I do so love beading. It also has an olden-time aristocratic feel to it without sacrificing modern style which I really like. There are only two things I don't like about the dress. One is the point lines of beading on the bodice. They bug me, and there's nothing I can do about it. The other is the line of the sweetheart neckline. You can't really tell in the picture (and honestly, you can barely tell in real life too), but it sort of points up at the ends, and to me, this makes it look like there are supposed to be spaghetti straps there that got left off. Both of these things are small, especially since I love the plunge of the sweetheart neckline (which will hopefully provide me with some semblance of cleveage), but they bother me nonetheless. That and the fact that this doesn't say "outdoor wedding" to me have kept me from purchasing it so far, but I think the time has come to forgive the dress it's faults and go for it.

What do you think? Which do you like better? Or do you think I should keep looking (which frankly I'm going to do anyway because it's fun)?

Here this is a better picture of the Monalisa. It's not quite the same dress, but it's close enough, and the model isn't falling out of this one:

  

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