Texas woman Kimberly Santleben-Stiteler, 43, gathered her friends for a “divorce party” after the legal end of her marriage, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports.

Her dad and brother-in-law convinced her to eschew her plans for a dress burning in favour of rigging the dress with $200 worth of explosives and shooting it with a rifle.

Her sister Carla told the Star-Telegraph: “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.”

Afterwards, concerned friends as far as 15 miles away got in touch to say they had felt the explosion.

Kimberly said the experience was “liberating”.