350lb Wedding dress

At seven and a half stone , Carly O'Brien is a mere slip of a girl. But if her bridegroom had tried to carry her across the threshold, he would have done himself a permanent mischief.

Thanks to 30 layers of material and 30,000 Swarovski crystals, Carly's wedding dress weighed an astonishing 25 stone and is believed to be the heaviest in the world. Family and friends took more than eight hours to dress her in the voluminous gown, which was more than 8ft wide and would not fit through the church doors.

Its train was more than 60ft long and was so heavy that ten guests had to push 5ft 3in Carly up the aisle.

The dress, designed by a family friend, is believed to have cost the bride's proud father Frank more than £15,000. It was accompanied by a white gold tiara, studded with hundreds more crystals.

Carly's sister Linda, one of six bridesmaids, said it was designed to look like Jordan's outfit when she married Peter Andre last year.

The bride arrived at St Peter's Roman Catholic Church, in her home town of Gloucester, in the same horse-drawn carriage used for Jordan's wedding. Three male friends were required just to lift her to the ground.

More than 500 guests were there to see her marry landscape gardener Michael Coffey. But they had to wait for the privilege. While the ceremony was due to start at 3pm on Wednesday, 16-year-old Carly took so long to get ready that it was 4.15 before she arrived.

Thelma Madine, owner of Liverpool-based Nico's Dressmakers, said Carly's dress was created with 120 metres of silk, 1,600 metres of tulle and thousands of metres of net.

Dozens of steel hoops were sewn into the skirt's 30 layers to give support to the entire structure. After stepping out of her carriage, Carly was forced to remove three under-layers - including one of the widest hoops - from her dress to fit through the church doors.

Despite its enormous weight, Carly insisted on wearing the dress throughout the wedding reception at Hatherley Manor hotel near Cheltenham. She spent most of reception sitting down, but did manage to get to her feet for the first dance of the night with her father, to the Temptations classic My Girl.

The bride and her 17-year-old husband then gratefully jettisoned their wedding outfits before leaving for a honeymoon in the Canary Islands.

A spokesman for Guinness World Records said they did not have a current entry for heaviest wedding dress. But the record for the longest train is 2,545ft, set by a Dutch couple in 2002.