My Dirty Wedding Dress

 So for those of you who don't know, it RAINED on my wedding day. Well not just rained, it poured! Yes, every bride's (or at least one having an outdoor wedding) worst nightmare! The only way to describe it is absolutely awful! That is not what this post is about though. So since this is what it looked like on my wedding day...

This was once a beautiful green space set up with chairs and an arbor for my wedding. Then the dang bottom fell out and completely flooded this space. Yes, all of the tan you see is muddy water! Notice the tree branches down on the right too. Many of our wedding guests had to stop on the side of the road on their way because the storm was so bad. Last thing, those are people out there in the rain bringing our chairs in. Bless them!

 ...my wedding dress got a little dirty. Right after the wedding, my mother-in-law found out how much is it was going to be to get it dry cleaned. Well it was well over $100. So I thought I would just wait until I got a job and then I would get it cleaned. So in the meantime, the dress was wadded up in a trash bag in the closet. It was too dirty to hang up with everything else. Well this "job" I thought I would have once we moved down has yet to come into my life...seven months later. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I decided to wash the dress in the washing machine (yes, the tag says dry clean only)..oh well. So here is what I started with.

 So I am sure you can see that this dress is no longer stark white. There are quite a few noticeable stains. So I broke out my trusty stain remover, Shout, and started rubbing it on all of the stains and dirty spots.

 

 I let it sit about 5 minutes and then I threw it in the washer. I put it on the delicate cycle with hot water and turned on. Then I just had to wait. When I got it out, it looked great! It didn't come apart! Not even a single button fell off!

 Yay! It is clean! The lighting is pretty terrible but trust me when I say that this dress looked a millon times better! There were a few little spots I could see, but they were on the underside of the dress. So they didn't even matter. I was so excited. I don't ever plan on wearing the dress again, but I was excited because I found this picture on Pinterest that I hope to recreate one day.

via Pinterest

The picture explains it. You photograph your little girl in your wedding dress and then she can display it at her own wedding. So cute! Now hopefully I will get a little girl one day so that I can do this! Since that worked out I decided to do the same thing with my wedding shoes because they were absolutely terrible. They were white. Even when it isn't nasty outside, it is almost impossible to keep shoes white. So needless to say these shoes looked bad. So here is the before and after.

Before

Before

Before

After

After

So much cleaner!!!!

 The only thing that didn't come out were the dirty toe stains. Me being the foot-hating person that I am thinks that is gross too, but it was in the 90's that day so it was inevitable. The rest of the shoe looked a ton better and now I can actually wear them again and you aren't going to see the toe stains because my feet will be covering them up. I was really nervous to do all of this, but it turned out to be a success! I saved over $100!