My friend, Laura, the Organising Junkie, has a fantastic post up at her site about wedding dresses.

To keep or not to keep

I left a comment, was number 86, came back 5 minutes later and the comments were already up to 99!

And just before I scheduled this for posting the comments were up to 125!!!

Clearly this is a hot topic.

Most people seem to feel that even if you do nothing with the dress, you should still keep it.

I read a lot of the comments and about 90% of the ladies still had their wedding dresses. If you don’t want to read all the comments, there are a few suggestions I really liked about what to do with your wedding dress if it’s 5 years past the time you got married (someone commented and said 5 years is about the longest time you could still sell your dress):

• make christening gowns for grandkids
• make ring pillows for use when your kids get married
• donate to organisations who make burial gowns for babies who die 🙁
• let your kids play dress-up in it and/ or have a photoshoot for your kids in your dress
• have a trash the dress shoot, assuming you can still fit into the dress (I can’t – I was super thin 18 years ago – weighed about 46 kg when I got married :))

Laura also asked 5 questions which I’m answering here instead of there.

Do you still have your wedding dress and how long have you had it?

I do have my wedding dress. It will be 18 years on 29th April 🙂

Where and how do you store it?

Mine isn’t stored in a particularly fancy way – it’s in a bag inside of a box at the top of my wardrobe.

Why are you keeping it?
I have no idea. I’m sure Kendra won’t want to wear it. Fashions change so quickly. I suppose the reason I’m keeping it is because my granny made it for me and she’s been dead for nearly 8 years so it’s very sentimental to me.

If you parted ways with your dress, what did you do with it?
If I do part with it, I’ll want to try and put it on and if I don’t look too ridiculous, maybe I could get some pics taken first. Otherwise, I’ll just take some pics of the dress like you see on the wedding photography blogs.

Have you ever regretted getting rid of it?
n/a

I still like the style – simple and elegant – and most of all, I love that I asked my granny on the phone to make my dress and said, “you know what I like” and she did. That, literally, was all the instruction she needed 🙂

Over to you…

Do you still have your wedding dress? Why or why not?

PS pics are scanned as we got married in the days before digital photography 🙂