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Buying your wedding dress is supposed to be one of the most exciting things for a bride. You get your Mam and your best friends and go spend a couple of days trying on beautiful dresses until you find THE ONE!

This did not happen for me………

I was very excited about getting my wedding dress. I couldn’t wait to go into a bridal shop and announce that I was the bride and be treated like a princess as I tried on every dress in the shop. So a friend and I organised for a little scouting trip to Dublin to check out some of the bridal stores and get a feel for the kind of dress I’d like to go for. Now just to remind you all that I am a size 20 and almost 5’8 tall. So we called into the first shop and asked if it was if was ok for us to look at some dresses. When they enquired which of us was the bride, the sales assistant wasn’t happy to find it was me. We had a look around the dress and realised that all the dresses in the shop were between a size 10 to 16. I asked the sales assistant if she had any dresses in my size and she said yes, one! She pulled out the ugliest dress you can imagine. We left soon after. As we walked around the streets of Dublin we quickly realised that none of the bridal shops had any dresses that I could try on. One lady insisted I try on a very expensive dress in a size 12! If you were a fly on the wall in that dressing room you would have died of laughter with the sight of me trying to get a size 12 over my hips!

After my trip to Dublin and a couple of local bridal shops I realised that I was not going to have any fun buying my wedding dress. Many sales assistants insisted that I should order the dress I thought would look nice, pay for it and wait nine months for it to arrive. There was no way in hell I was going to buy the most expensive dress I will probably ever buy without trying it on and knowing that I loved it.

Being the google addict that I am I went to the internet for help. Surly there are plenty of bridal shops around Ireland that keep plus size dresses in stock ……. I found one plus size bridal shop in the whole country, one! Ruben Bridal. Luckily enough it was only 15 minutes drive from home. I had never heard of this shop but I prayed to god that they would make me feel human! I called and made an appointment and organised for myself and my Mam to go have a look. I couldn’t face having my friends there, what if it was going to be embarrassing again….. It wasn’t!

We were met by two very nice ladies who made us feel more that welcome. They brought us up to a small studio over the local shop. In this studio I tried on at least 15 dresses and felt fab in every one. The ladies were very helpful and not at all pushy. They advised me that they were getting in some new stock in a few weeks if I would like to wait and come back before I made a decision. So I did. A month later, last week in fact, my Mam and I returned to Ruben Bridal to have a look at their new stock and I ordered my perfect dress!  I have to say it was very exciting and it was exactly what I said I wanted all along. Perfect!

My dress won’t be in until Feburary and then some alterations must be done on it to make it fit perfectly. I can’t wait. They have a huge selection of bridesmaid dresses in all sizes and I will be purchasing them in Ruben Bridal also.

If you are of larger size and want a fab wedding dress Ruben Bridal is the first place I would go!

If anyone has any suggestion or comments, please email me joyce@soap.ie