One Sweet Day: gift exchange 2

Earlier in the series:
One Sweet Day: such a teaser
One Sweet Day: gift exchange

While I was opening my gifts, Joe was also opening his gifts a few floors below in his own suite. I had my maid of honor run the gift down to him with a cute little note.

After reading the love note, it's time for him to open his gifts.

I especially adore my wrapping paper, which goes so perfectly with our black, pink and white theme. Unlike myself who got a typical man-wrap of a gift, I really thought about the presentation of my gift. It's nice to see that he was careful when in his execution of the opening process :)

Alas, to the gift itself. I got him a Burberry watch to replace his existing Guess watch, which he did right after opening.

I'm so glad he loves his gift, and still continue to wear it on special occasions.

One Sweet Day: gift exchange

Wow, it's been almost 4 months since I have posted any wedding related items. Since then, I have received the CDs containing all of our images and have since began sorting through the pictures. I'm finally at the point where the professional pictures recap can begin. Here is the first part of the series, the girls getting ready.

During our wedding planning days, I debated about whether to hire the hair stylist/make up artist to come to my suite to do the bridal party hair and make up. After the discussion about pricing, I could not justify the extra dollars to have Ann and her team come to our hotel. So, at around 4:30 am, we loaded the wedding party up and headed about 10 miles north to get our hair and make up done. Saving some money did come with certain sacrifices, including some glorious pictures of us getting ready. I can't say if I were to do it over again that I wouldn't have done the same thing over again. However, I do miss having those pictures as part of our portfolio. So, instead, I'll leave you with what I do have, some post make up/gowning pictures (to be recapped in another post).

Before I started getting dress, the best man Bill came knocking on the suite with a gift in tow. This was before anybody had arrived in the room other than my sister who was the maid of honor and the assistant photographer. I was glad to have this moment to myself to open it in private.

Since long ago, I decided not to wear a necklace with my bridal attire, but had gifted my bridesmaids cute pink pendant necklaces. Joe took the liberty of buying me a gorgeous pink sapphire to go with our whole look. I still love the necklace to this day and continue to wear it quite often.

Here is my maid of honor helping me put it on since my nails make it very hard to work the clasp.

Let's rehearse

Our rehearsal was held the day before the wedding and it went off without a hitch. Because we had so many out of town guests that did not have a car (due to the damn economy), Joe and I ended having to be the transporters for most of the guests. Consequently, we were separated for the majority of the time leading up to the wedding. It was a small price to pay for having our guests came all the way here for our special day.

Well, let's get to the pretty pictures.
I wore a pretty little black and white number from Express. I love the dress because it had these pretty little pockets to store my necessities (phones, lip gloss, etc). The shoes are purple from Nine West that I scored when they went on sale for $21. I love a good sale.

Here I am with my maid of honor in the bridal suite right before we headed downstairs to meet everyone and head out to the church.

Well we arrived downstairs to this pretty sight. Joe was super stressed out that night because he panics easily. Here he is on the phone, probably yelling off the ears of one of his groomsmen.

We didn't have a lot of pictures during the actual rehearsal because expectedly, everyone was busy trying to remember who they're standing next to and when to do their thing. We were in and out of the church within 1 hour and thankfully, everyone was being cooperative.


We held our wedding rehearsal at Dave and Buster's. It was great because we had a private area all to ourselves.
And the food was awesome.


After dinner and some mingling with our guests, we began to give out presents to our wedding party. The guys are up first.

Then it was the girl's turn. I didn't have any picture of them opening their gifts. But here is a pic of all of us after everybody had a chance to open and put on their gifts.

The night ended with me tying each and everyone of the groomsmen's ties, as well as the fathers'. I am very particular about the way people tie their ties and wanted for them to look perfecto, so I lined them up and start doing my thing, while other people are playing shuffleboard.

After the rehearsal, we transported everyone back to the hotel and I gathered all of my wedding party to quickly helped me set up for the following day. The process was much faster than I thought with so many able bodies, we were in and out of the reception room within 20 minutes.

The work of our handy best man.

Notice something very familiar? Well I completely copied Jessica's (over at tying the knot) bow tie on Ikea vases down to the method (which is demonstrated on a video tutorial). Thanks a bunch! I loved how they turned out and so easy to do!

My best friend's wedding

I have previously wrote about my friend Sarah's wedding coming up after my own. Well, her wedding had came and went, and it was beautiful. So, while I am waiting for my own file of 2000+ images to start recapping on my own day, I thought I show some of her pro wedding pics for you to see how magical of a day it was.

The beautiful bride and groom
The bridal party
The bride and me (I was the maid of honor)
Bride + groom + wedding party
Getting the bride ready for the big day
Having loads of fun in the process
And more fun on the dance floor
Dancing with the groom during the money dance
My husband dancing with the bride during the money dance
And some gorgeous details of the day

Thank you very much

I have spent the past few nights (instead of doing other things that I should be doing) writing our thank you cards. Unfortunately for me, I had to write all thousand of them and Joe can't help since he has terrible writing! So, this was the one wedding task that I had to take on by myself, but I'll forgive him since he was an active participant during our wedding planning process.

Thankfully, after a few nights, all of them are completed and are on their way to the recipients. Joe dropped it off this morning; this was his one contribution to the thank you cards.

After the wedding, I was planning on custom design our thank you card with the gocco. But, I completely just ran out of steam and could not for the life of me bust out the wonder machine. Since I wanted to get the writing out of the way, I resorted to ordering them through Shutterfly. They have generic design thank you cards where you can upload your own photos, and we decided on a 4-photo template. Unfortunately, they did not have pink to coordinate with our whole wedding color scheme, but at this point, I didn't care too much and picked the traditional blue cards. Other than that, the process was pretty easy where I uploaded four of my favorite wedding pictures (graciously sent by our fab photog for this single purpose only). I was pleasantly surprised by the result when they arrive at our doorstep about 2 weeks after clicking purchase. They were a bit pricey, came out to approximately $80 for 50 cards, but it sure did beat me having to slave over the design of a custom card.

I was glad I went this route because if I hadn't, we probably would be late to send out our thank you cards or scrap the entire project in and of itself. The wedding tasks is officially over...well, except for maybe sorting out the mess that is still sitting in the garage and try and sell anything we can.

Without further ado, here is what the guests will see when they open it.

One Sweet Day: Such a teaser

While I was in a meeting at work today, my blackberry did its little buzzing to notify me that I have an email. I scanned to see if it was something important that needed immediate response and I saw my photographer's email with an attachment. I opened to see what it is and lo and behold, it was our wedding teasers. I was so excited that I almost screamed! Of course, I had to wait another two hours for the meeting to be over to open the attachments. Though I could have opened it on the blackberry, I wanted to savor the pictures and see it in its glory, so the wait continues. I won't do the same to you though, so here they are in all their glory. I can't wait to see what else our fabulous photographer has in store for us!

All photos by Jerry Yoon Photography

One sweet day: the price to pay

Living in the bay area, weddings do not come cheap. I was foolish to think that I can have a wedding for $10,000 budget, as this was the initial budget we set before even looking at anything wedding. Then, all we had to do is google some things wedding and realized very quickly that doesn't even cover the food. Talk about sticker shock. So, of course, we had to do a little refining to adjust the budget to a more realistic one. The final number came down to $30,000.

Now, most of the time, people do not include honeymoon and wedding bands into the wedding budget. I'm not sure why that is as they are an essential and necessary factor in any wedding. So, for purposes of the budget breakdown, I will include everything wedding related.
Budget breakdown (for 100 guests)

Invitations and other paper goods: $1,000 (see detail breakdown in this separate post)

Dressing her

• Wedding dress: $1,100
• Alteration: $350
• Veil: $75
• Shoes: $40
• Hair flower: $40
• Jewelry/accessories: $40
• Manicure/pedicure: $80
• Hair and makeup: $350 (with $50 tip)
• Wedding bands: $1,700 (for 2 rings)
• Makeup/hair trial: $180
  

Dressing him

• Suit: $400 (bought)
  
• Shoes: $100
• Accessories: $50 for tie and belt
• Wedding band: $300

Vendors

• Rehearsal dinner: $1,700
• Ceremony site fee: $1,100
• Reception site/food: $11,000
• Photographer: $5,300
• Videographer: $1,500
  
• Flowers: $1,800
• Linen/chair covers: $450
• Cake: $500
• DJ: $900
• Tips: $500

Others

• Honeymoon: $4,200
• Wedding party gifts: $1,500
• License to wed: $75
• Hotel for bride and groom: $700
• Miscellaneous expenses: $500 (to cover things I forgot or too small to mention)
  

Total: $36,530

We are over our budget by about $6,500, primarily for the honeymoon and the wedding bands. It's a lot to spend on one day, but it is an important day of our lives. If you were to ask if it was worth it, I'd say no. We could have just eloped and spent this money on a better and bigger honeymoon, or even put it towards home renovation. But since elopement is out of the question, I would do everything all over again in a heart beat, because I could not have imagined our day went any differently with any other details missing.

On a side note, we received approximately $5,000 in gifts (monetary and non-monetary). This is very very low in Asian culture, but we did not have a typical Asian wedding. In the end, we were just glad to see that the majority of our families made it to the wedding and enjoyed themselves at the wedding. We couldn't have asked for more than that.

Gorgeousness

Oh my gawd. I saw this invitation suite today on Elizabeth Anne Designs and drooled over it. How gorgeous are these to incorporate photo and pocketfold in one. The little flower on top just make it much more fab!

photos via [Elizabeth Anne Designs]