Shoe Quandary

When looking for my perfect wedding shoes, I had a few criteria that I was pretty firm on:

1. Ivory, to match my dress, of course
2. Heel can't be taller than 2.5"
3. Pointy toes because they make my legs look less stumpy
4. Less than $175
5. Some sort of interesting detail because I love shoes and don't want them to be boring!

Apparently, having five bullet points that you're not really willing to budge on makes shoe shopping ridiculously hard. Yeah, I'm picky...

In my everyday life, I almost always turn to Zappos to solve my shoes crises. They have almost everything and their shipping and return policy can't be beat. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for in wedding shoes on Zappos. The closest I came was a pair of Stuart Weitzmans that fit 4 out of 5 of my needs, but the shoes weren't particularly interesting on their own. I tossed around the idea of buying them:

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To give 'em some razzle-dazzle, I would have bought some crystal brooches from M&J Trimming like these:

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Attaching them to the front of those shoes would have made for some pretty beautiful shoes, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend $150 on shoes that I wasn't in love with. I thought I could do better.

These shoes were gorgeous:

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They were a bit out of my price range, though, and I don't have a bow motif going on in my attire and wasn't sure that I wanted to introduce one at this late stage in the game.

My google searches were all turning up similarly unsuccessful results, so I turned to sites like Ebay and Etsy.

Etsy yielded beautiful results like these shoes being sold by GossamerWingsStudio:

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These are incredible, but they don't really match my dress (Someone from the Hive should get them, though!! Tell me if you do!).

Ebay didn't do me much good either, since I wasn't finding anything I hadn't already seen from googling.

I was almost resigned to buying cheap kitten heels like these ones:

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I was figuring that I would just have to dye them and try to embellish them myself, when my shoe quandary took a turn for the more complicated! Stay tuned for more shoe drama :)