Liz and Val's PJ - WP/GF, 1-24-09; Details =)

OK, so now I'm back and covered in mosquito bites (the joys of honeymooning on the Southwest Florida coast;) it is gorgeous here though!).

Some wedding details...

Florals

Bridesmaids bouquets were 6 deep red Gerbera daisies, stems wrapped in black ribbon, surrounded by banana leaf. The bouquets had little red crystals interspersed throughout. The flower girl's bouquet was the same thing, but half the size.

This is a pic a friend took of some of the bridesmaids, you can get an idea of their bouquets:

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My own bouquet had red gerbera daisies, red roses, red dahlias, and red hypericum. The stems were wrapped in white ribbon with red ribbon braided over the white.

Ignore the weird expression in this snapshot, lol

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My toss bouquet was a tiny version of mine.

Decor

Our colors were red and black, with some white accents.

We had black chair covers and black table linens. Plates were plain white, and we used red napkins which we folded and wedged under the soup bowl so that it could hang off the table.

The decorator put panels of red fabric along the ceiling. He made red and white feather centerpieces in tall, thin vases which were set on top of these discs that light up and shoot light upward into the centerpiece. We put a bunch of little red votives on each of the tables, which burned for hours and hours (they were a fabulous dollar store find--6 red candles in decorative glass for $1!--I bought all of them!!!).

Here's a pic that a friend took:

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I'll add more details soon! DH is begging me to make smores at the hotel's fire pit.
 
Wow I love your color scheme! Everyone looks great. The tables look really awesome :thumbsup2
 
Liz -- everything is gorgeous. Your flowers were so unique and pretty. Your reception decor was absolutely beautiful!!! Thank you for sharing pix!
 
I just wanted to add some pictures from the wedding. They're low-res images so they look a bit spotty, but oh well ;)

These are our invitations from the first wedding. Val is a graphic designer, so he designed every part of the invites (but not without some of my instructions :thumbsup2 )and printed them on shimmer card stock. The ceremony invite was an accordion style card with folds. The reception card was its own separate card. Each picture represents one particular fold of the invite.

I wanted a cameo/silhouette type of element on the invite, so Val designed a pattern in our wedding colors of our profiles.

Ignore the red border around the pictures ;)

On the cover of the invite I had one of my favorite quotes, and Val did a floral vine type of design around it:

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The ceremony portion of the invite was this:

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The reception card was:

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And the backsides of all of them had our pattern on it:

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I wanted to add a couple of low-res versions of some shots that my photographer took :thumbsup2

This is my hairdo:

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A picture of me:

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The Church :) Isn't it quaint?

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My Little Ringbearers :lovestruc

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My Bridesmaids During the Ceremony:

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Me from the back, hoping the crown doesn't mess up my hairdo:

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Right after the ceremony, a Romanian custom--a band plays outside and the bridal party dances a hora:

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Val and I walking over from the Church to take pictures:

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Us with our bridal party:

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I love this picture:cutie: :

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Here is my ring. The engagement is in the middle and the guard on either side is the band:

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Hubby and I; We took some of those pictures on the Church property, and I had told our photographer I wanted photos either at a farm or at a barn. Luckily, the church is surrounded by farmland, so drove for a few minutes and found an old barn for pictures!:

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Our cake, which my sister made:

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Val's dad made wine for the party; he made a red wine and a white wine, then Val designed wine labels using childhood pictures. I was the red wine, he was the white:

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Our Dessert Table:

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OK, now that wedding #1 is out of the way, I can talk about Disney :woohoo:

Val, my parents and I just came back from our planning session. It's been craziness!!! We came back from Canada a couple of days after the wedding, then we had visitors for a week, then we finally took off the the west coast of Florida for a few days for a little honeymoon, came back and left the next day for our PS.

We stayed at Saratoga Springs, which is one of my fave hotels and is now no longer a quiet place!! I had never seen it so crowded before, but at least many other people seem to love it too; I felt it was under-appreciated ;)

We arrived on Sunday, and had our session yesterday morning with our planner, Marion Stewart. I loved her, and so did my parents. She was very friendly and also calm and collected.

We began our tasting around 10:45 AM in the GF kitchen (or should I say we began our gigantic brunch at 10:45 AM... ;) ).

i'll add pictures in a moment...gotta run. Husbands are so needy sometimes!! :laughing: not that I can complain about my darling other half. I'll post details tonight!
 
Holy Cow!!! Everything is beautiful!!! I love all of the little touches you added to make everything your own..well done! :goodvibes
 
OK, so we were greeted in the lobby of the GF Convention Center by our planner Marion. We headed to the kitchen and started eating right before 11.

Our names on the wall made us smile :goodvibes

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And the cherubs sitting on the table beside us made us smile too :angel:

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We tried 4 pre-reception items: the vegetable samosas, the seafood fritters, the spring roll, and the chicken in a wonton cup. We loved the first three, weren't so crazy about the chicken in the wonton, so we went instead with the chicken on the ginger skewer. I was concentrating heavily on the samosas, so I forgot to take a picture :sad2: Well, I didn't try the seafood fritter because I'm allergic to shellfish.

For appetizers, we tried the shrimp cocktail and the crabcakes (although by "we" I mean "they" ;) )

We all loved the way the shrimp cocktail is presented; I love the teardrop shaped plate:

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They all thought the crabcakes were too salty:

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We tried the raspberry-champagne sorbet. It's beautifully presented in a little glass flower with some yummy kiwi sauce on the plate:

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We knew that for the dinner we would do a duo no matter what. We tried two different combinations.

The first was beef and lobster:

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The mashed potatoes were delicious. Because I can't have lobster, I had a plate with just beef:

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The beef was really good, very tender. The chef put a port wine reduction on the beef; everything had a great flavor.

We also tried a chicken and tilapia duo. It was a simple pan-seared chicken, well seasoned. My family had the tilapia crusted with a nut that I couldn't have, mine had no crust. Apparently they all preferred it with the crust. They served it with mashed potatoes and asparagus. I told Marion that I definitely wanted asparagus with whatever I choose; it's one of my fave foods.

So I was practically in a food coma by then so I forgot to take a picture of the chicken and fish, but they tasted really good.

We also had the white chocolate slipper for dessert:

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It was really delicious.

Final Food Decisions
:

For cocktail hour, we're doing the samosas with mango yogurt sauce, spring rolls with chili sauce, seafood fritters with remoulade, and chicken and ginger skewers.

For dinner, we're doing a caesar salad, the shrimp cocktail as an appetizer. We're having the raspberry sorbet. The entree will be the beef filet paired with fish. We would like sea bass, but we're good with the tilapia too. We'll have it with the mash and asparagus and some carrot.

We're not having dessert. It's a way to save money, and to ensure that the guests eat the cake that we're buying, so cake is dessert :cake:

We did our cake tasting later in the afternoon at the end of our planning session. We chose a couple of different combinations for the cake. The main cake will be red velvet with cream cheese icing. One of the sheet cakes will be yellow cake with Bavarian cream filling. The other sheet cake will be marble cake with the raspberry cream filling. i'm just glad I'm the bride, so I'll get to have a piece of all 3 on the big night!!!

For the champagne, I asked Marion to see if she can find this particular blush/red sparkling wine because I like the taste first and foremost, and secondly the blush color matches my wedding colors.

I loved dealing with Marion. The only thing I'm a bit stressed about at this point is florals. I feel like that wasn't really completely resolved. Val and I really love candelabras, so we're most likely going to alternate: half the centerpieces will be gold candelabras with a flower centerpiece in the center, the rest will be gold candelabras with all candles, and decorative crystals. So i'm hoping the floral budget estimate isn't something staggering.

Checking out for now :bride:
 
Wow - great pictures and wonder journal.

I love the ringbearers bears - can I ask where you got them. That is such a great idea. We are having a 4 year old ringbearer and I think he is a little scared about walking down the aisle by himself. The ringbearer bear would be great for him to carry and then he could keep it.

Linda
 
Wow - great pictures and wonder journal.

I love the ringbearers bears - can I ask where you got them. That is such a great idea. We are having a 4 year old ringbearer and I think he is a little scared about walking down the aisle by himself. The ringbearer bear would be great for him to carry and then he could keep it.

Linda


Thanx Linda :)

We loved our ringbearer bears! I chose them as a cute, fun alternative to a pillow; for the Disney wedding, we're going to have them walk down with tuxedoed Mickeys ::MickeyMo The boys loved them and they make great souvenirs from the wedding as well.

We got our bears at David's Bridal. I think they each cost $24 or something. I'm sure I could have gotten them cheaper online, but I was there at the time checking out accessories, they had 3 of them in stock, the bears were properly dressed, and I knew the quality of the stuffed animals right then and there (super soft!!).
 
Thanks for the info. I have been to Davids Bridal and never saw those bears. They are very cute and perfect. Seeing your bears made me think about getting a bear for our ring bearer. I might go to Build a Bear and get one. I'll have to start checking them out.

Great idea.
Linda
 
Marilise -- weren't those samosas to die for? :faint: OMG! I LOVED them and wanted them but we had to forgo them because we are already doing a soup course and a salad course (after a brunch-y pre-reception). Everything sounds fabulous!
 
Marilise -- weren't those samosas to die for? :faint: OMG! I LOVED them and wanted them but we had to forgo them because we are already doing a soup course and a salad course (after a brunch-y pre-reception). Everything sounds fabulous!
UGH, they were SOO delicious!!!
 
Hey all :) It's been a while since I updated and I've spent the last 2 weeks catching up on everyone's PJs and TRs and questions.

Had a nice (but cold, at least for a South Floridian!!) Thanksgiving in South Carolina, and am now back home where I can enjoy my yummy coffee drinks from my wonderful coffee machine (and save $4+ a day because I never go to Starbucks anymore!!).

Now most of the dust has died down from first wedding in September. Biggest woes with that one now--I haven't gotten my thank-you cards out yet because Val has been too busy to design them. It's wonderful being married to an artist, but they take on more than they can chew sometimes!!! But those will be done this week finally and I'll be getting them out at about the 3-months-post-wedding mark.

We had 1,000 proofs from that wedding, and over Thanksgiving weekend I loaded most of them into two 500-picture photo albums so that I could have them well organized. We love our pictures, but I feel like we were heavily nickeled and dimed for stuff. In the end, we have spent about $7,000 on the picture package. This does include the coffee table books that we'll be making, but we definitely went a bit over there. Luckily our photo package for the Disney wedding will cost much less!

I haven't even done anything yet with our photog or our videographer from first wedding, because I was wedding'ed out after that day! We'll have to plan a trip to Canada to organize our wedding videos and photos in the new year anyway.

Good news:

I booked a videographer for the Disney wedding. He's the videographer we had for our Canada wedding! Ever since we had first met, we had told him we were doing 2 weddings and he had mentioned that he'd be interested in doing the Disney one. He's a huge Disney fan, is super familiar with the whole property because he's spent a ton of time there.

He was going to be vacationing at Disney with his wife and son at the end of January, so he told us if we wanted to use him, it would be the same price as in Canada, no extra fees or anything like that since he was going to be here anyway. We were really happy with his service and he interacted SO well with the bridal party and guests. We also loved that he always films the rehearsal the day before; it's nice to have footage of that as well. So we discussed it with him and our wedding planner sent the waiver out and that's all set! :thumbsup2

My bridal party has been steadily ordering their dresses at David's Bridal, which is great. You know, it's funny. I always heard such bad reviews about David's, but I've been there several times to get bridal party-related clothes and accessories for both weddings and my experiences have been really good every time. I guess I'm lucky to have a good location close to home.

My two maids of honor will be wearing these dresses in Truffle brown:

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The rest of the bridal party will be wearing different long dresses of their choosing in Rose Petal.

OK, out for now, I'll update more later today!
 
Woohoo, a large portion of my invites are out :banana: (ahem, a tad late, but we won't say anything about that :rolleyes1 ).

Val and I will FedEx our Canadian guests' invites to my in-laws over there so that they can add some Canadian postage since we forgot to bring some down.

Some guest list drama from the guests up there though: a bunch of the guests who were at the wedding up there have been pressuring for invites to the Disney wedding. It's like, um hello, we had the wedding there to accommodate friends up there and the one down here was to accommodate friends down here. We had planned on inviting a few people from up there to the one down here as well, but more wanna come. I told my cousin up there about that and she was like, "Disney World's open to the public! Why are they insisting on coming to your wedding just cuz they feel like traveling to FL?!" :rotfl:

Plus my reception is an adults only reception and this is not really understood in Romanian culture (or not accepted, whichever), so I was forced to make exceptions for certain guests for their kids because my in-laws didn't want everyone to get pissed at them. So while my own first cousins' children were not invited for instance, and close friends' children were not invited (and this measure was accepted graciously and with understanding by these particular guests), I've had to make exceptions for random kids that we're not even close to. But I suppose it could be worse. We had always planned to have our own nieces and nephews in our wedding party (4 little ones total), and in addition to that, I think we'll be dealing with another 7 children.

Not that I don't have a fondness for children by the way, but inviting everyone's children would not have fit in our budget. Our guest list is roughly 300 people, and adding children would have caused the list to balloon by at least 100 people if not more.

I'm also kind of pissed at MIL for blabbing about the wedding so often to people that we had no intention of inviting. My mother and I were always so good with never discussing the wedding with other people unless it was close/immediate relatives. If it somehow came up in other circumstances, it was 'Yeah, we're doing a wedding in Canada for friends and family up there, and we're doing one after in FL for our circle down here.' But she has to always talk about "the wedding at Disney" this and the "wedding at Disney" that to people who aren't on the guest list!! Which of course puts us in awkward positions!! :mad: Well, she can field their "where's my invite" questions when they come.

Whew, ok, please excuse the rant, lol. I love my MIL and we get along really well, but this kind of drove me crazy. In Romanian culture, guests only give cash gifts to the couple because the thought process is that they wish to give you money to offset the cost of the wedding, as well as a little extra to help you start your life. So in essence, you can use a large portion of that money to pay off wedding costs if you wish and still have money leftover to put towards your goal of buying a house, or a car, etc whatever goal you and spouse have.

But that is not the custom in my circle. My parents are hosting this wedding completely on their own, and it's a heavy cost and we invited a large number of guests on their side so it's not fair to impose more of my in-laws' guests on the wedding here when we already had a wedding up there to accommodate those very people. And the wedding there cost WAY less because it was a cultural hall as opposed to a venue like Disney.

OK, excuse my rant for the 2nd time. I'm also not money-obsessed, but in this economy where both of my parents are self-employed and job security is not what it was even a year ago, every freaking penny counts :guilty:

But on to happy thoughts, the rest of the invites will go out tomorrow!! :cloud9:
 
Well, yesterday we started putting actual money towards the wedding, so it feels completely real and official, as opposed to a wonderful dream :wizard:

RSVP's have begun to roll in slowly... many yes's, some no's. We'll see where we end up. 315 people were invited, and when I factor in people who have just told us they won't be able to make it, we're currently at 280 people who will be coming, or haven't yet sent in their responses.

I'm hoping we get the majority of our RSVPs on time, so that we have a couple of days to chase any guests down who haven't given us a response :eek:

I'm in the process now of trying to work on my floral issues. I wanted gold candelabras with flower arrangements, but I was being quoted $175 per arrangement, plus the cost of renting the candelabra, putting me at a little over $200 a centerpiece. That price was for a large carnations-only arrangement. This was really too steep for me, considering the number of tables that will need centerpieces, so I told them that I can't pay an amount anywhere near that per centerpiece, so I'd like to know if they could do an arrangement of mostly greenery instead with just a few flowers (I am alright with any type of flower as long as it's in my wedding color family), and she quoted me roughly $150 for something like that, plus the cost of candelabra.


Other than that, things have been going pretty well and everyone's getting really excited. I made a wedding website and people have been visiting and leaving nice messages and feedback.

Our room block is filling up, but I'm sure there will be some additions and some minuses since various things have changed since the save-the-dates went out. We're at about 70 room nights of our contracted 113, and we'll see if we need to make any changes since we're just several days away from being able to make permanent changes.

OK, that's all for now! :bride:
 

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