I just learned today that the ENTIRE Grand Hyatt is completely sold out for the weekend of July 7th….and we only got in 3 reservations there, in the end (myself included!).  Absolutely no rooms left.  I’m also hearing a rumor that Pike Street Suites may be booked too.

So out of town folks—if you haven’t booked your hotel, book it soon!!  The wedding block deadline is June 7th and it sounds like that weekend is filling up fast for downtown hotels with weddings, cruises and “some big event” that the Hyatt wouldn’t tell me about.  Please contact us if you have any questions about other hotels in the downtown area.

Categories: Misc Planning, Vendors
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We’ve had a few wedding checks this weekend!  Yesterday, Sri accompanied me to Marcella’s for my first dress fitting—need to bring in the bodice, the bustline and hem it up as well as put in the French bustle.  I can’t wait to see how the dress looks once it actually fits me better in a few weeks!  I did learn, while waiting in my dress yesterday, how painful my wedding shoes are….so I headed over to Nordstrom’s and bought a bunch of Foot Petal inserts to ease the pain…hope that works!

This morning, Matt and I attended dance lesson #3—yup, for our first dance!  I’ll keep the dance and the song a secret…but it’s been fun learning!

Lastly, this afternoon, we dropped by the local Turgeon Raine jewelry store and placed the order for our wedding bands!  Whew!  We’d been shopping around for the bands for the last month, visiting several jewelry stores and finally narrowed it down.  We are super excited with these–and, man, it was just in time!  Since we had to order them (for the correct sizing, metal, width…), it won’t be in til the 3rd week of June—cutting it close!

It’s been very fun coming home everyday and rushing to mailbox to see what RSVPs we get—super thanks to everyone who has sent them in already.  We are so excited to see all of you!

Categories: Dress, Vendors
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Over this last week or so, we’ve been getting RSVPs back (thanks to those that have sent them in early!).  I noticed, though, that a large majority of them had a light pink smudge on them.  “Oh no” I thought…and after calling my mother and asking her to look at the invitation, she confirmed that the pink pocketfolds we used smudged onto the invitations somehow in the mailing process….I’m guessing through a combination of high heat and sorting machines.  I even hand cancelled the majority of the invitations! Fortunately, we’ve learned through some guests that they thought the smudging was intentional—”like a pink mountain in the background”–ha!  I’ve laughed it off…and all that matters in the end is that the invitations are read-able (which they are).  So if you’re reading this, just wanted to let you know that the design was not intentional!  Below is an invitation that I got back in the mail (I wrote the wrong zip code…good thing I have extra envelopes!):

Lucky us, though–I happened to let the invitation designers know about this for future reference in using these particular pocketfolds in this color.  They felt so horrible that they are offering us complimentary personalized Thank You cards and envelopes!  Score!

Categories: Misc Planning, Vendors
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Over the weekend, I picked up lots of boxes of wedding stuff, such as the wedding favors!

Being that this site is for the guests, I’m keeping it a secret what’s inside the boxes for now!

I also finally picked up the invitations!  Whoopee!  I’m very happy with them–now I just need to slap on a ton of frog buttons and buy some stamps and they’re ready!

Categories: Misc Planning, Vendors
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I’ve had 2 Hair Trials so far and haven’t been very thrilled with them.  The first one was a lady who was more interested in doing my makeup than my hair.  The second was a girl who’d never worked weddings before (which I didn’t know until the trial!).  Both times my hair looked flat and boring.  I’m finally having a trial with a company this week that I actually had booked last September that tons of girls on the Knot boards absolutely love.  I originally booked them as backup so I’d have time to meet with other hair stylists but I’ve learned that not a lot of people do on-site hair services, which is what I’d really like.  I’d love the bridesmaids to come over in the morning, share some breakfast and get our hair done together.  Anyhow, I hope this week’s trial works out!  Here are some photos of inspiration….any favorites?

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That’s what we learned today when we went downtown to begin shopping for and narrowing down my wedding band (Matt has already decided on his—just the simple, classic platinum band).  We only found 2 stores open and have some good candidates from those but we’ll have to go shopping one more time next weekend on a Saturday when all the stores open.  For now, these are the 2 designs we’ve narrowed it down to—yes, they’re very similar.  I’m going for a half channel-set diamond look.  We just need to do a bit more comparison shopping.

In other news, I’ve done a lot of re-vamping of the website this weekend.  There’s a new design and I’ve filled in a lot of the content, such as wedding party bios, more info around timeline, recommended hotels and where we are registered.

The invitation content has been signed off for and they’ll hopefully be done in about 3-4 weeks.  From there, it’s a matter of writing out addresses, buying stamps and sticking those frog buttons on the pocketfolds!

Categories: Misc Planning, Vendors
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Quite productive this last weekend.  Saturday, we headed over to meet with Bonnie of New Renaissance Cakes to finalize the design and flavors of the cake.  We went over a few inspiration designs and finally settled on this one with a few tweaks:

We’ve picked 2 flavors for the time being: Fine Dark Belgian Chocolate (triple chocolate with chocolate ganache and Belgian chocolate mousse) and Bananas Foster (banana cake with smooth caramel and dark run-caramel mousse).  I may switch out the Bananas Foster to a lighter flavor, such as Citron (white satin cake with English-style lemon curd, homemade with fresh eggs, sweet cream-butter, lemon zest and filled with lemon mousse) or Raspberry White Satin (white cake soaked in homemade raspberry liqueur topped with white chocolate raspberry mousse).  So hard to decide!  Let me know what you think!

We also finalized the invitations after several rounds with Jonathan and Whitney from Brown Sugar Designs.  I don’t have any pictures of the final mockups but I’ll post them soon–they’re a simple pocketfold design with inserts and I’m planning on buying a bunch of ivory-colored Chinese frog buttons to use as the closure on the outside of the pocketfold.  Next–need to buy a calligraphy pen and attempt to learn a bit of calligraphy for addressing the invitations.

This month, we need to get started on the registry!  Definitely Macy’s and Crate & Barrel..hopefully we’ll get around to it this weekend.

Been also narrowing down the honeymoon choices.  Right now, it’s between Belize and Tahiti.  They’re both equi-distant from Seattle and only 2 timezones away each.  Belize has beautiful, white, sandy beaches, superb diving (the 2nd largest barrier reef in the world next to Australia), lots of “huts on stilts” sort of accommodations, excellent food, pretty affordable.  Tahiti is a honeymooner’s paradise with a ton of over-the-water bungalows, clear waters, home of the large manta ray, luxury accommodations and July is the month-long celebration of Tahitian culture.  So hard to decide!

Categories: Honeymoon, Reception, Vendors
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I’ve started thinking about transportation lately…and because I want us to be able to arrive and leave in style, I quickly called up British Motor Coach here in Seattle to try to score one of their fun cars…luckily, they still had availability of cars despite 7-7-07 being “the busiest day we’ve ever had in the history of this business” [gulp!].  Before the ceremony, after our “first look”, we’ll ride around in this cool, old-school London taxi cab to take photos in:

After the reception is over, we’ll be whisked off away to our honeymoon suite in this stylish black and silver Rolls Royce:

I still need to work out details for a shuttle for guests staying in downtown to ride into Newcastle…but that’ll have to wait after I get a better sense as to how many of y’all will need a shuttle!

Otherwise, been keeping busy with various wedding things.  This last weekend, I went and met with the florist to show pictures of flowers I really liked now that I have a better sense of it as well as going over all the details so I could understand the costs and take out as many unnecessary things as possible.  Monday, had dinner with Janel (day of coordinator to the rescue!) to catch up, summarize the florist meeting, and just chat about all the remaining things that are left to do.  She’s going to be SUCH a savior.

We’ve also been working on invitations with this great husband/wife team from Brown Sugar Designs.  We had a really really great design that we loved at first but the pocketfold was a chocolate brown which I’ve been told by my parents is a bad color that I should avoid to use on the invitations [sigh].  Hopefully, I can still accent with it.  So we’re back to the drawing board in terms of colors but hopefully we’ll finalize that soon…we’re meeting with them again this weekend.  So far, we’re doing a basic pocketfold invitation with various inserts.  We’ll probably end up using the same color as the bridesmaid dresses as the main pocketfold.

This weekend, we are also going to meet with the cake lady to figure out flavors and design…and afterwards, time-bearing, we’ll drop by Macy’s to start a registry as they’re having a special wedding registry event.

Oh! I should also mention that planning is underway for the bachelorette weekend and bridal shower—thanks to Jigna and Sri who are leading the way to plan them.  Yay!

Categories: Misc Planning, Vendors
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After debating about it forever, we’ve picked a cake vendor — New Renaissance Cakes.  I’m sure we’ll be happy with it.  Bonnie’s gotten good reviews and she’s reliable.  Matt and I attended her cake tasting back at the end of October and then just put off the cake decision making for awhile.  We tasted the cake of one more vendor whose cakes were sooooo incredibly delicious but also double the price of Bonnie’s cakes.  In the end, I’d rather splurge on other things and just have a good, decent cake.  We’ll likely end up picking at least 2 flavors: chocolate (cuz’ Matt looooves the chocolate) and some sort of white cake (I’m leaning towards bananas foster right now).  Next, we have to decide on a cake design–here are a few that I like:

Speaking of vendors, we also met up with Jonathan and Whitney of Brown Sugar Designs a week and a half ago to design our invitations.  After the labor of making the Save-the-Dates, we decided to go the route of getting the invitations professionally done.  I’m really excited as their work looks amazing—they’re even cool like that and keep a blog.  We showed them some of our current color choices and a few inspiration words: “simple, elegant, modern, classy, chic, flowers okay, not too traditional, not too detailed”…and that was that!  We’re meeting up with them again this weekend to look at their first mockups…I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Meanwhile, sounds like we have an appointment on Jan. 2nd at Mona Lisa Salon in Hong Kong to take our Pre-Wedding Photos (aka cheezy Chinese engagement photos).  It’s actually quite the cultural thing to go to a studio and take photos together in wedding attire (and no, not yours but rather ones that the studio has on hand).  Couples also sometimes will dress up in old-school Chinese silk outfits and take pictures drinking tea.  These photos then get printed out and blown up and are *typically* shown at the reception.  We probably won’t show off the cheese but it’ll be pure fun.  My mom’s super excited about how these will turn out.  I’m a bit apprehensive about how cheesy this is going to be…but alas, I know it’ll be fun.  Just roll with it I keep saying….

Categories: Reception, Vendors
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Early on in this wedding planning process, I thought “I want video but I really don’t care that much about it”.  I had hoped to just pick a videographer and get it over with.  Instead, I met with 3 different videographers and have been sitting on making a decision for, oh, almost 2 months.  Today, I decided to simplify things and just pick the first videographer I met with who had the simplest package—Bogle Productions.  I know I’ll be happy with all 3 and Bogle has gotten rave reviews everywhere.  He doesn’t have things like a “love story” or a “day-of-edit” but I think it’s good to just get a straight up videographer who just shoots your day and that’s it. Fortunately, I contacted Cory Bogle today who had another potential bride taking my date…and by the end of the day, he emailed me back and said the date was open again! Yippee!  So I’m just going to go ahead and book him.  Whew.

Categories: Vendors
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