Woman blows up wedding dress in massive explosion to finalize her divorce

A Texas woman’s divorce party had the most spectacular closure when her wedding dress was blown in a massive explosion that was heard from miles.

On November 11, 43-year-old Kimberly Santleben-Stiteler took to her Facebook account to share a picture of the big explosion that marked the culmination of her divorce after been married for 14 years.

After she signed her divorce papers on November 9, Santleben-Stiteler felt she needed something stronger than just a signature to start a new chapter in her life, and so she planned a ritualistic burn of her wedding dress.

But with the help of some of her relatives, the plans grew into something more extreme and cathartic for the divorcee. Read more on our Twitter account @amomama_usa

“This is what happens when your Dad and #1 brother-in-law finds out you want to burn your wedding dress. This was a gazillion times better!” Santleben-Stiteler captioned a photo of the big explosion.

About 40 friends and family members gathered at the woman’s family farm in La Cost, 30 minutes west of San Antonio, Texas, in the Medina County, for the celebration.

For the liberating stunt, the wedding dress was filled with 20 pounds of an explosive material called Tannerite, to be ignited by a firearm shot fired by Santleben-Stiteler.

“We have a friend who is a bomb tech, and he kept saying, ‘that’s really a lot,’ like five different times when we told him our plan, so we had to back it up,” she told Fox News.

Santleben-Stiteler only needed one attempt to hit the target and blow it to pieces in an explosion that seemed out of a Hollywood action film.

“We were all getting messages asking if that was our explosion people were feeling and hearing around the county, up to at least 15 miles away.”

-Carla Santleben-Newport, The Centre Daily Times, November 12, 2018.

“I had a lot of advice and suggestions from friends and family, like donating it for premature babies and baptism gowns. However, to me, the dress represented a lie. I wanted to have a divorce party to burn the dress,” admitted Santleben-Stiteler.

Another Texas woman had the same feelings toward her wedding dress, and while she didn’t have access to such powerful explosives, she also staged a symbolic burn of hers in a post-divorce garage sale.

34-year-old Briana Barksdale from Spring, not only wanted to get rid of her dress, but she decided to sell all of her ex-husband’s possessions, so she took to Craiglist to offered them for sale.

Barksdale, who battled for two years to divorce an abusive husband, dedicated the sale to “every woman who has ever been in a relationship that was abusive, that hurt, that they shouldn't have stayed in, that they didn't know how to get out of.”

As a closing act for the garage sale, she did a week after her divorce was finalized, Barksdale set her dress, which she hung on a wooden pole, on fire.

While the two aforementioned women used fire as a symbol of destruction and for erasing unwanted memories, two other women gave fire a completely different meaning when they used it to add some action to their wedding.

When 32-year-old April Choi and her girlfriend 28-year-old Bethan Byrnes planned to marry each other they knew that they wanted something different for the ceremony, and, being a couple of daredevils, they decided to set their wedding gowns on fire after exchanging vows.

The brides executed the act to create the most original wedding picture, and the image was so good that it soon became a viral phenomenon.

As dangerous as it sounds, one of the women had used fire in professional performances before, and they had fire extinguishers and medics present in case anything went wrong.