Diary of Planning a Wedding in Edinburgh Friday, September 14, 2007 Dying the Shoes for the Bridesmaids Well, I had not really had anything go wrong so far in the wedding preparation, up until now. All I can say to anyone who is thinking of getting shoes dyed for their bridesmaids is: don't buy your shoes from BHS (British Home Stores). As you may know, I have three bridesmaids and a couple of months back I bought them all some nice looking bridal shoes from BHS for £22 each. The shoes were ivory coloured and BHS said that they were dyable. I sent them away to a place in Newcastle to get dyed and they phoned me up almost immediately to tell me that they had had problems with dying some BHS shoes in the past in dark colours - they had either gone a lighter shade or patchy, what did I want to do? I decided to go ahead with the shoe dying anyway, as I couldn't think of any alternative, but unfortunately they have now come back looking quite different from the colour of the dresses :-( The shoe dying place sent me a piece of material that they had dyed to the same colour as my bridesmaid dress swatch to prove that the problem was with the shoes and not their colour mixing and it was quite obvious that the problem was with the shoes as they had matched the colour almost perfectly. So it is now getting closer to the time of the dress fittings for the bridesmaids so I am going to have to think of a solution pretty quickly. The plan is to go into Berketex with Kirsteen tomorrow just to check that whether or not there is any remote chance that the shoes will go with the dresses. If not, then we will trail round all the shoe shops in Edinburgh in the hope of finding some matching shoes. If that doesn't work I could buy shoes from the place that dyed the shoes and know that they would be able to match the colour in this case. Come back for an update soon... Labels: Wedding Accessories posted by S Thomson @ 10:45 AM 0 comments Sunday, April 08, 2007 Buying a Wedding Tiara There are various places in Edinburgh to buy a wedding tiara. The first and most obvious are the wedding dress shops. All the shops that I visited had a good selection of Tiaras and you can try these on while you are trying on dresses, or separately. Usually you don't need an appointment at most of the bridal shops if you are just going in to look at accessories. Most of the Tiaras that I looked at were priced around £80 or so. Another alternative is the High Street shops e.g. Debenhams, John Lewis and BHS. These all stock tiaras, which are generally cheaper than they are in the bridal salons. If after buying your dress, veil, shoes and all the other wedding stuff you may feel that you don't want to spend yet another £100 on something that you'll wear once. But don't despair, you can be thrifty like I was and buy your Tiara from Ebay. A lot of people don't realise that many Ebay auctions are for brand new goods, not just used goods that people don't want. Ebay has a huge selection of Tiaras for as little as £10! I actually got mine from an Ebay shop belonging to someone in New York who makes Tiaras. The auctions have lots of clear photos so it's easy to choose one you like. I was a bit unsure at first, but given the Tiara was just £10 and the postage £5, I would only lose £15 if it turned out to be awful! Anyway, the Tiara arrived in good time, was well packaged and looked great, with lots of lovely sparkly crystals on it. It may not be as well finished as some of the ones that I have seen in the bridal shops, but it looks great and I don't think you could tell the difference unless you inspected it really closely. You can Register on Ebay UK for free quickly and easily and view all the Tiaras for sale. Labels: Wedding Accessories posted by S Thomson @ 2:43 PM 0 comments