Rachel’s dream wedding dress with purple silk accents

RACHEL’S DREAM WEDDING DRESS WITH PURPLE SILK ACCENTS

I wasn’t the girl who grew up dreaming of the perfect Big Day, and so when we got engaged, my fiancé (now husband) and I found ourselves drawn into the big wide world of wedding planning, and my priority was, of course, The Dress.

Finding Caroline was the answer to questions I didn’t even know I had yet, and the entire process from first contact through to picking up the dress was just perfect.

Caroline’s website was so lovely and welcoming, which sounds an odd thing to say about a website, but if you’re reading this and planning your own wedding, I hope you can empathise that there are a lot of truly terrible sites out there! It really opened up my eyes to what was possible – it also made me realise that I had no idea what I was looking for, and that I needed professional help…

Luckily for me, that help came in the form of the fabulous Caroline Arthur. I set my first meeting with Caroline for mid-July 2014 – 15 months pre-wedding, and she suggested that I start a Pinterest board to gather some ideas about what I was looking for in a dress, so that we had somewhere to start with when we met.

A few weeks before my first meeting with Caroline, I sent her the dress board so she could start having a think about my style and preferences, and I sent it with a note that I didn’t think it would be too helpful, as I seemed to like a huge range of different styles. However, on meeting Caroline, she pointed out that there were a few similar themes running through the pictures, and so I had managed to subconsciously create the starting point for The Dress.

Caroline’s studio is such a calm and peaceful space and the pure joy of the way that Caroline works really does make you feel like a princess!

The most fun part – of what was an immensely fun day – was the different elements to truly make the dress unique and all mine. A lot of twirling & measuring later, the decision was made alongside Caroline’s statement: “I’ve never made a dress like this before” – I knew I had The One.

I couldn’t imagine doing it in any other way. It was such a personal, engaging, and fun process, I can’t imagine walking into a shop and picking something off the rack!

Caroline is an absolute angel, and I couldn’t imagine my wedding without her influence, so it’s all I can do to recommend her to anyone I meet who’s getting married – meet with Caroline, get swept up in her enthusiasm, and you’re guaranteed to get married looking entirely fabulous!

Thank you, Rachel, for this lovely guest blog.

Rachels’s gown was made from our CoutureKit collection, in ivory silk dupion, Bernice corded lace and a fairly hard-to-source plum coloured Chinese silk dupion!

Beautiful photos by Murray Clarke taken at stunning wedding venue Langshott Manor