My dress is made of silk, which can be hard to get creases out of. I wanted to minimise the amount of wrinkling on the dress as much as possible in transit. We were flying for 11 hours to Tokyo, then from there another 6.5 hours to Hawaii, so it was going to be quite tricky to get the dress there without too much wrinkling. I didn't want to check the dress in either just in case it somehow got lost along the way. I could probably replace almost all of the other things I was bringing but not my perfectly tailored wedding dress!

The first thing I did was buy a wedding dress travel box from The Empty Box Company website. A friend of mine had travelled on a plane to get to her wedding destination and had used one of these boxes and said they were great. They are the exact maximum dimensions allowed by most airlines as hand luggage and fit nicely inside the overhead bins on planes.

I was a bit dubious that my dress would fit into the box, but I rolled it, still in it's garment bag, and it fit very nicely without any need for pushing or shoving to get all of the dress in. I highly recommend these boxes, they are awesome and make travelling with your dress so much easier!

Next I rang both the airlines I was flying with to see if I could hang my dress up in the coat closets on board. They asked loads of questions about the dimensions of the dress, the size and weight, and when they realised it wasn't a massive puffy wedding cake dress both airlines were totally fine with it.

I got the dress there in one piece (the veil however lost most of the middle teeth on the comb) and without too much wrinkling.

Here I am at the airport in Tokyo with my wedding dress box and another bag with the two large tupperware boxes of sugar flowers, plus the cake toppers made for us by a friend, and my big laptop backpack! I certainly wasn't travelling light.