Long Sleeve Wedding Dress with Lace: My Experience at Palmyra Cove

I got married at Palmyra Cove last fall. Church in the morning, river in the afternoon. The whole split-venue thing sounded great on paper, but about three weeks before the wedding I started panicking about what to wear. Everything I tried on either felt too much for the church or too little for standing outside by the water for two hours.

The dress I ended up with had long sleeves. I know — long sleeves. I wasn't looking for that. But the chiffon was so light I actually forgot I had them on. The lace was embroidered, floral, all over the arms and the bodice, and it was sheer enough that you could still see my skin underneath. It didn't feel like I was wearing a blanket. It felt like I was wearing something that moved with me.

The morning of, I stood in the church and my mom cried. I didn't. I was too busy trying not to trip on the runner. But I remember thinking, okay, this works. I didn't feel overdone or underdone. Just there.

Then we drove to the park. The boardwalk has those blue railings, which I'd worried would clash with everything, but in person they just looked like... blue railings. The reeds were tall, almost my height, and the light was that soft gold that makes you feel like you're in a movie. My husband wore a black suit with a champagne vest. My daughters — they're six and eight — wore little champagne dresses with sequins that caught the sun every time they moved. They kept spinning until they got dizzy.

I didn't have a plan for my hair until the morning of. My stylist just pulled it up into a bun and stuck a comb in it. That was it. My earrings were long, floral drops that I'd bought online last-minute. They matched the lace on my sleeves by accident. I hadn't even noticed until I saw the photos later.

We took pictures for about an hour. The girls ran ahead, stepped on my hem twice, almost fell off the boardwalk once (they didn't). I kept smoothing down my skirt because the wind wouldn't stop. At some point my husband told me to stop fussing with it, so I did. Those ended up being the good ones — the ones where I'm not thinking about the dress at all.

People keep asking if I was cold. A little. But the sleeves helped. Not in a dramatic way, just in a "I'm not hugging myself in every photo" way. I'd take that over being too warm in the church any day.

I don't know if I'd recommend this wedding dress to everyone. It worked for me because I had two venues and two kids and a husband who doesn't have patience for brides who fix their skirts every five seconds. If you're having a ballroom wedding with air conditioning and no wind, get whatever you want.

But if you're going to be outside, and you're going to be walking on wood planks, and you might have little people grabbing at your wedding dress, the long sleeves and the light fabric were genuinely fine. Not magical. Just practical in a way that let me forget about it.

I still have the dress. It's in a box in my closet. I don't open it much. But when I do, I remember the sound of my daughters' shoes on that boardwalk more than I remember the lace or the chiffon or any of it.

That's probably the point.