I did the best I could to plan a big, expensive event. The truth is, I've never done this sort of thing before and I can't say I really knew what I was doing. However, I knew what I wanted in general and figured that I'll do what I can towards my goals and let the chips fall where they may on the wedding day. So basically, I had no concrete idea what would stand out to my guests and what touches they would find attractive or amusing.
So here is a list of things my guests have specially told me that they appreciated:
- Music from Tetris for the prelude music. As guests were getting seated for the ceremony, the DJ played a mix of Tetris music. Anybody who played Tetris growing up instantly appreciated this!
- Using Love Me Do by the Beatles for the Bride's Entrance music. People were clapping to the music as I approached and I must say, it was one of most gratifying sites I've ever seen!
- Using Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom End Credits for the recessional music. Some guests didn't get this, but others thought it was totally awesome.
- A few of my guests thought the ceremony that the Rabbi created with me and my hubby had our personalities stamped all over it. It was very important to us that both of us were represented in the ceremony and both backgrounds were given equal attention. The result was a nicely balanced ceremony.
- The MC and DJ. I can't take credit for their work, of course. I can't even claim I found them myself. A good friend of mine hired them for her wedding and recommended them to us. We hired them because we liked the MC, who was also our sales rep, and their company also handled our photography. I figured the fewer vendors we had to deal with, the better, as long as the few vendors we choose were good. They were an awesome choice! Our guests actually got up and danced and I owe it to them!
- Rocky the raccoon. Our stuffed animal raccoon was a huge hit! The significance of raccoons was explained in the ceremony, so when people saw him at the reception, they understood why he was there. What I didn't expect was for people to dance with him on the dance floor, pose with him for pictures and try to feed him glasses of champagne!
- Guest book tree. We ordered a tree poster from Etsy that came with leaf stickers. Guests could write their name on the leaves and stick them on the tree. Everyone really loved it, but it was a real b*tch getting the sticker backing off. Afterwards, hubby thought maybe it would have been better if we had pre-stuck the leaves and all guests had to do was sign it. However, sticking stickers on something was part of the fun! Oh well.
- My many dresses. I wore a total of four different dresses that night. The white wedding dress, the aubergine evening dress, the red wedding qipao and the low backed lavender dress with navy blue sash. I sewed the last dress myself. Guests seemed to really like this particular tradition in Chinese weddings and I love wearing fancy dresses!
- Cake toppers. We used bride and groom rubber duckies we bought at City Hall when we got our marriage license. People commented that they had never seen such cake toppers before and thought they were adorable. Hubby and I just thought they were cute when we got them. I originally didn't plan on having cake toppers at all, but hubby really liked them. Turns out he wasn't alone!
I do have a couple of regrets. One is that there were none of my hand-wired butterflies on the cake. I spent an entire evening hand-wiring 60 butterflies, carefully stuffing them into a big envelope and sent it to the venue's baker. My fingers were quite sore by the end of that evening. I made the effort to confirm that the baker had received the butterflies along with an example photo and general instructions. I also emailed the sales rep and banquet manager about them and they acknowledged everything should be in order. None if made any difference and there were no butterflies on my cake. The other regret, which is not nearly as big, is that I didn't get around to making centerpieces. The venue provided votives for the tables, which is great because they looked pretty, didn't block anyone's view of anything, and I didn't have to bring a big box of centerpieces for them to set up. It turned out fine and I didn't have to drive myself crazy making centerpieces, but there's a part of me that thinks it would have been a great craft project to undertake!
Other personal touches included our hand-made ketubah, which didn't make as big a splash with the guests, but seemed to impress the Rabbi and Maitre'd. It was made by me. Lol! It's actually a rather small ketubah, but I was constrained by the size of the artsy papers I had to work with. The ketubah was made in layers. I bought a black bordered cardstock frame with cardstock backing and built it up from the backing. I also bought this green paper with some stylized plantlife on it. I pasted that onto the center of the backing. I then cut out individual blades of grass out of darker green, plain paper and pasted it onto the bottom border of the stylized paper. I left the upper parts of the blades unglued so that they curled a bit and stuck out. The ketubah text was printed onto a sheet of plain vellum paper and that was the paper we signed. Once that was signed, the vellum sheet was placed, right adjusted, under the curled tips of grass. The black bordered frame, which was prepped before the wedding, had a tree cut out from brown paper pasted on the left border, and the bottom border also had blades of grass glued to it. Instead of leaves, I tore off blossoms from my leftover fake hydrangea flowers and hot-glued them to the top of the tree, which became the top border. At the signing, I placed the vellum sheet onto the backing, then took a clear plastic sheet and placed it under the blades of grass over the vellum sheet, and then placed the modified frame border on top. Everything was taped in place temporarily so that it can be displayed. Once home, I glued the vellum sheet down and then tried to glue the plastic sheet down in way to minimize the paper's exposure to air, then I glued down the frame. It was a lot of work, but I think it was worth it! Actually, I had a different design in mind when I was designing it in my head, but once I started working on it, the project sort of just resulted in what I described above. Lol! I'm planning to mount the whole thing onto sturdier backing to prevent warping in the future.
All in all, I think I was a decently crafty bride. Here is a list of my completed projects:
- 6 bouquets
- 2 corsages
- 5 bouts
- hubby's crocheted yarmulke
- 3 memorial candles (just cylinders of printed vellum paper)
- ketubah
- invitations
- 3 metal-framed fabric purses (special gifts for some special people)
- hair flower clip
- Bridal Suite sign
- Reserved seating signs
- my last dress
- table number signs and stands
- veil
- garter
The above list was a LOT of work. There was research, a couple of failed attempts for a few items, and a lot of effort. For a few items, I ended up causing more trouble for myself than I had to. For instance, the table numbers, reserved seating signs and the bridal suite sign were printed on plain white paper that was cut and then mounted onto cardstock. What would have saved me a lot of time would have been to print the signs directly onto cardstock. The invitations took way too much effort because it had so many parts, and so it had many steps just to complete one. There was no need for the invitations to be as complicated as I made them out to be.
My advice for other DIY brides is to keep things simple and don't sweat the small stuff. Do the practical stuff first and then the fluff stuff. When I say fluff stuff, that includes things that are usually present in weddings, but aren't necessary to make the wedding happen or make the wedding run smooth, like a veil or centerpieces. Make sure you have plenty of time to do your DIY projects and always have a backup plan in case the project fails. That means that if your veil came out funny and unusable, be prepared to buy one. If you find you've bitten off more than you can chew, find ways to scale back.
There are also lots of ways to save money without DIYing from scratch. Blank invitations and escort cards can be bought at stationery stores and printed out at home. Pretty table number templates can be downloaded and printed onto sturdy cardstock. Our table number stands were just cones of cardstock paper with a slit cut into the tip. The table number card was slipped into the slit and voila! The table number is standing up! Also take advantage of certain wedding websites or other event-planning websites if they offer RSVP functionality. Make sure the RSVP functionality fits your needs. The great thing about online RSVPing is that if someone forgot to RSVP, you can IM, text or email them and they can take care of it right away, rather than waiting for snail mail to come through. You'll also save on paper and postage. You should also take advantage of what the venue has to offer you. I didn't realize that I didn't need to bring a card box. They had a beautifully decorated mailbox and wheelbarrow setup for cards and gifts. The venue also provided the ceremony wine, a beautiful tea service set and tray for the tea ceremony, the cake cutting and serving utensils, champagne glasses for the toasts and votives for the tables. It's nice that we choose a venue that did the baking, catering and hosting. It was nice because they did a good job. It would have been horrible if they did a bad job. So choose your vendors wisely.
My last bit of advice for future brides is this: don't let the best be the enemy of good enough. Probably not an exact quote, but it says what I mean. Searching for "the best" causes immense amounts of stress because "better" things are always on the horizon. Remember why you're having a wedding when you feel sucked in by the wedding industrial complex. You're having a wedding because you want your friends and family to witness you getting married, and because afterwards you want to party with them to celebrate! At its heart, that's all a wedding is. If you keep this in mind, that desperation you may have been feeling trying to order the "perfect" shade of rose petals to line your aisle may start to melt away, the grief you may have been feeling when you realized the veil is not EXACTLY the way you imagined it may lift, and the frustration you may have been experiencing when things aren't going according to your plan may begin to smooth over.
Granted, I had it very easy during the planning process in some regards. I am not one of those brides that dreamed of getting married since girlhood, so I was not pursuing efforts to make my fantasy a reality. My family and friends are well aware of my record for being headstrong, stubborn and opinionated and refrained from trying to control any aspects of the wedding. My hubby's family stayed out of the planning completely as they are a very carefree, hands-off kind of family. Neither of us had a large guest list, so not much arguing there, and we had plenty of moral support whenever drama did occur.
We also did a lot of things that made the process much easier for us. We choose to limit our wedding party to just us, 2 groomsmen and 4 bridesmaids. The less people we have to organize, the easier on us. We didn't choose their outfits. We gave them guidelines like, wear a dark suit or navy blue dress and accessorize as you like. That way, no time was spent shopping and the bridal party can take care of themselves. We also limited the number of vendors we had to deal with. That also meant we had to choose our vendors carefully. I spent more time weeding out vendors that didn't meet my basic criteria before arranging to meet them. That meant we only had to meet a handful of vendors before choosing the one we liked best out of the bunch. I also spent lots of time researching reviews for these vendors. Keep in mind that many wedding websites will take down bad reviews at the vendor's request without notifying the reviewer, so make sure your research is as extensive as possible. If there is little reviewer information on a vendor, make sure you get a good amount of time with the vendor in person to get a feel of their personality, style and professionalism. Be clear about what you want and see if they can deliver evidence of being able to handle such requests. We also kept from making too many specific requests. We really wanted to just give the vendors an idea of what we'd like to achieve and then let them use their best judgment. Lastly, the thing that really made my wedding planning process smooth was keeping to a well-thought out schedule and keeping to a strict budget. Basically, staying organized and keeping the number of parts involved to a minimum. Fewer moving cogs means less things to track and less opportunities for the machine to break down. The tradeoff is that if one of your few cogs does break down, the machine is more likely to roll to a halt because it's mostly likely a pretty critical cog.
If my planning timeline had been less thought-out or less organized, I would not have had as much free time during the last month before the wedding. That is not to say I wasn't busy, but nothing took on an air of frantic desperation. I firmly believe that proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance. However, some things that go wrong are beyond your control. If that happens, roll with it and move on. Don't let anything spoil your day because nobody and nothing should be given that much power over your wedding experience!
No comments:
Post a Comment