Another Wedding Show!

Earlier this week, I attended a Luxury Bridal Show sponsored by The Wedding Salon. I was able to get a complimentary ticket to the event via Style Me Pretty, a wonderful wedding blog with lots of beautiful pictures and lovely ideas for weddings.

The show was designed for the luxury wedding market and all of the vendors there were such. Pretty much everything was out of my price range, but it was fun to walk around and get pictures of the beautiful table settings and taste cakes.

Here's one of the table settings. The centerpiece is gorgeous and huge, over 3 feet tall. I like the filler they used in the vase - clear rocks that reflect the colors of the table settings. See how blue they look in the photo? They're actually totally clear.


Here's another enormous table centerpiece. The column is covered in the white roses and white orchids decorate the top and base of the doric flower column. The shiny structure spiraling up the flower column are little gold votive candle holders. I think I would prefer a simpler version of this centerpiece, making it more of a ionic column without the orchids, giant leaves, and candle holders.


Here's a simpler version of a spiral candle holder and white rose centerpiece. In this one, you still get the height of the piece, but your guests can actually see each other across the table.


I love centerpieces that are low (so everyone can see each other) and still bursting with flowers. This low centerpiece is nice and girly with all of these pink roses.


The show had models in wedding dresses with bouquets walking around the space showing off the designs. What was really funny was that they had a sign hanging off of them with information on the dress designer, who made the jewelry, which florist did the flowers, etc.


Here's a wedding cake from Mark Joseph Cakes. I love the simplicity of this design (and so do bridal magazines, I've seen this cake in at least 2 issues) and the beautiful sugar bows. They had cake samples as well - chocolate with pistachio icing and vanilla with strawberry icing. Both the cakes were good, but I think the icings both overpowered the cakes and their flavors (pistachio and strawberry) were too strong.


Sylvia Weinstock had cake samples, which were super moist and yummy. No cakes to look at though. :(


Here's the gift bag everyone got, with gifts "worth more than $250". There were some cool beauty samples but that was about it. There were also tons of magazines, which made the bag ridiculously heavy.


Mars Candy had a booth there as well to show off their personalized M&Ms and Dove bars. For the M&Ms, you can even get your picture printed on the candies. Which while sort of cool, also kind of creepy, since you're basically eating yourself....


Here's a bouquet from one of the florists there. I like the bright colors and big bunched-up-ness of the roses.


All in all, it was neat to see pretty things you could have at a wedding, but I'm kind of glad I got to go for free. There were too many different types of vendors and not enough of each kind. When there's only 1 make-up artist, 1 florist, 2 cake people, but 2 dress cleaners, 4/5 vacation spots, and 4/5 jewelers, you're not going to really be able to do any comparison shopping or see a wide range of options.

My first wedding show

Earlier this summer, I went to my first wedding show. It was at Kate's Paperie and was called "Unveiling the Best". Kate's sponsored the event with Martha Stewart Weddings and Darcy Miller, who's the editor of Martha Stewart Weddings, was there as well.

Since I'm looking to be a DIY bride (well, as much as I can be with time constraints and general procrastination), I was mostly at this event to get ideas and see what details were popular at weddings.

They had some cool appetizers including some yummy corn salsa and these amazing deep-fried shrimp cocktails. Totally cool, but probably totally expensive. Not only were they giant shrimp but each were individually set in its own cocktail glass. Which means 1) time-intensive and 2) not eco-friendly (since they would have to clean each of them and use up a lot of water).


The caterer had some gorgeous dessert platters as well. Here are a bunch of truffle lollipops on display. These must have taken forever to make and set up.


Here are close-ups of the truffle lollipops and pastries. I took some samples home for FI. I wrapped them carefully in a bunch of napkins and stuck them in the top of my purse (very carefully).


A beautiful wedding cake! The flowers are super delicate and gorgeous. However the cake samples were okay, not great. They were too dense and a little dry.


Some pretty stationery sets.


A gorgeous purple and green themed table setting. I really liked this since our colors are lavender and yellow.

It was a fun way to spend an evening. I got to try some yummy food and dessert samples, got some free stationery and see some beautiful wedding set-ups.

Giant fortune cookies!

At the beginning of August, FI and I traveled to NoVA to attend the wedding of Sean and Lai-fan. They held their ceremony and reception at The Tower Club which is at the top of what we NoVAns affectionally call "The Shopping Bag" building. It's also the building that Stephen works in, so we just let him lead us all upstairs.

The ceremony was in the late afternoon and the sunlight made the whole space look so beautiful.
Caroline and Fleix brought Cady along. She was super well-behaved throughout the whole ceremony. And during the rest of the reception as well, as EVERYONE (like everyone, not just the girls, but all the guys too) wanted to hold her.

What a cute couple!

Here is the wedding cake. I think Lai-Fan's colors were red and orange. The bridesmaids wore muted orange dresses and flowers were red and orange. The cake had the red roses.

The centerpieces were thin branches arranged in a glass vase and they hung all these cute little red lanterns. The vase was on a mirrored plate and they had scattered Chinese candies all around the tables. The candies were a big hit as those were the first things everyone grabbed for as we sat down.

Our favors were giant homemade fortune cookies that the wedding party (and a few friends) made the last few nights.
For the table names, they used Chinese characters with good meanings - prosperity (fu), love (ai), family (jia), etc.

It was a really great party. Even though it was small, about 100 people, we kept it going pretty late. We danced until the DJs packed up and then we didn't leave even as the clubhouse people started setting up the original furniture.

They liked mine!

This past weekend we attended the wedding of my college friend Angela and her fiance (duh) Howard.

It was back down in NoVA so FI and I had another road trip. We're getting pretty good at these. We split the driving both ways, I drive the Delware to VA part and he drives the Delaware to NY part. We also have both the GPS and the handy atlas at our disposal so we both know where we're going and how to take alternate routes if necessary.

The ceremony was outside next to the reception hall. We thought we were totally late, but we were rushing in like everyone else. A combination of a mostly Chinese guests wedding and a kind-of-far out location kept everything from starting on time. So we didn't miss anything although we did end up with seats in the way back.

Here's Meime, one of the bridesmaids. Angela's favorite color is purple and it was used throughout the wedding. I love these dresses. They are really flattering and the color looks so rich.

We could hear what was happening during the ceremony, but couldn't really see anything. It was a nice and short ceremony. They had a vibraphonist for their ceremony musician. I'm not sure what a vibraphone is, but it sounded nice.

Here's the happy couple!

As part of their ceremony, their "unification ritual" was a "blending of the sands". They poured in sands of different colors (he with purple and black, she with pink and white) in at the same time to create a jar of layered sand. The final product was really pretty.

Here's one of the flower arrangements. I like the dark purple, white/cream, and pink color combinations she used.

Here's one of the appetizers. It was lightly seared tuna on top of polenta (I think) and covered in black seasame seeds. The other appetizers (which I didn't get pictures of) included ceviche and crab dip.

They did 2 table set-ups. Alternating dark purple and cream, and high and low.

The first table set-up had a dark purple tablecloth with a low centerpiece. The centerpiece was a wide-necked glass vase with water and floating tea lights. Then around the vase was a floral wreath of cream ranunculus(?) and pink roses.

There were 8 tea lights floating in each vase. The center one was dark purple and the rest were white. What was cool was that the tea lights had been lit for a little while so they all melted together.

The other table set-up had white tableclothes with a tree branch centerpiece with rose petals. Hanging off the branches were strings of pink clear beads and hanging pink tealights.

Also the napkins were altering colors too. I liked the contrasting looks of the two table set-ups. Not having high centerpieces on all the tables kept it from feeling like you couldn't see anything.

Here's the wedding cake with purple accents and a double happiness cake topper.

The cake was a shortcake with strawberry and cream filling. Very light and yummy!

Remember how I wrote about creating a fun RSVP card for my friend's wedding? And how I really wanted to win whatever they were giving out as prizes?

They actually had all of the RSVP cards on display at the wedding, in a binder near the guest book. It was really cool to see everyone's work and see some of the really creative (and not-so-creative) ones. The ones drawn by kids were especially cute.

Anyways, back to winning... I won! They picked 12 winners and we each got to keep one of the wreath centerpieces. I gave mine to Mom since we didn't need to lug it back to New York.

My friend Loun-Loun won as well. She did a cool ink drawing in the style of Chinese painting. There's bamboo and a Chinese couplet "Bai To Shei Lao" - basically "together until you are both white-haired and bent over with age".
It was a lovely and low-key wedding, even with 200 guests. It was fun to see some NoVA friends that I hadn't talked to in a while.