What happens when a 22-year-old and her aunt spend $70 on two miles and 1,400 yards of yarn? Something completely stunning and wonderfully sentimental.
Weddings are supposed to be one of the most special days in two people's lives, yet the celebration of love can too easily be bogged down by the price of it. Wedding dresses, tuxedos, dining halls, catering — it all adds up.
Now, we all know that love is priceless, it doesn't matter if you've got a million-dollar ceremony or one at City Hall, as long as it's with the person you love. Like veteran Amber Mills' wedding dress made of toilet paper, sometimes things become more valuable because of what they mean not because of what they cost.
When Abbey Ramirez-Bodley saw that every dress she wanted was over $1,000, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
With $70, eight months of work, and the help of her beloved aunt, she achieved the impossible…
H/T: Yahoo / The Huffington Post
When Abbey Ramirez and her then-fiancé Jake Bodley began to hunt for a wedding dress, they noticed one thing: the exorbitant, high prices. Everything she wanted was over $1,000!
“I looked and looked and looked, and the ones I liked were outrageously expensive,” the 22-year-old from Tulsa told ABC News.
When Abbey was 3 years old, her aunt, Jennifer Wollard, taught her how to crochet. Abbey knew that the only way she was going to get the dress she wanted was to make it herself and that her aunt would have the know-how to make it all happen.
The aunt and niece spent a measly $70 on two miles and 1,400 yards of yarn. They would spend the next eight months making doilies. Every weekend ,they would get together and painstakingly sew the doilies together.
For $70, Abbey was able to make this stunning piece. But it wasn't just about getting a nice dress, it was about the work, the familial bond, and the sentimentality that went into it.
"It was wonderful because my aunt and I spent so much time together and she's really important to me," the bride told the Huffington Post. "This is always a piece I'll have with her. When I look at it, I'll remember the wonderful wedding I had and also the eight months I got to spend with my aunt making it."
Abbey and Jennifer didn't even have a pattern, all they had was their wits and experience. The sleeves of the doily wedding dress alone took nine hours of work.
"When I put it on, I was, for one, amazed that it looked exactly like what I thought it would look like in my head," she said. "We didn't have a pattern, so it was hard — I couldn't take the image I had in my head and give it to my aunt and say, 'This is what I want.' It was amazing. It was emotional. [Especially] when you put that much time and love into something."
“It’s all hand-sewn and we started on the skirt,” the bride explained. “Then we went to the top, then we had to improvise the band to give it shape a little bit. By that point, it was getting pretty heavy so we had to come up with a solution to stabilize it a little bit. [Jennifer] used a see-through fabric to base it around the sleeves and straps to give it that base and sturdiness it needed.”
The groom was absolutely stunned by the dress — he wasn't even sure that they'd finish it on time but alas, they did.
“Everybody loved it,” Abbey said. “A few people kept my aunt tied up all night asking questions about it.”
Please SHARE Abbey's story if you think her wedding dress is something that will be in the family for generations!
