Ah, a couple of updates!

Last weekend, Yanxian and I went down to Ted Collection for her dress design (at last!) I must say, I can sometimes be averse to effeminate guys, but Don and Yap were simply amazing. They're like aunties, who chit chat about everything under the sun but still get things done. Yap was so accommodating about our designs, and based on the cut-outs that we brought along, he designed a really nice bridal gown with all the features that Yanxian wanted. I think we're more hyped about the evening gown though, it looks really quite nice, at least on paper.

Now we're finalising our photographer and make-up artiste. I got a little too fast and got hold of the florist, only to be told that the decor comes about 2 months before the event, which means it'll be Aug before we meet up with the florist.

Also, we've finally found a first dance song that we both like. =)

We actually got a couple more things tied down during the span of 1 week! Visited Ted Collection again today to confirm that we're using their services, and paid the $500 deposit. As usual the men were very bitchy and even bitched about pregnant brides who only told them after the dress had been made, and showed us the very same dress in question! But wow. We both LOVED that dress! Anyway, we are working on a very comfortable schedule here for the dresses. We can chill out for the next few months and work on conceptualising everything first, then head back in Feb for a discussion on dress design. The dress should be complete by June, ready for photo-taking.

We also firmed up on what the dinner will be like, including a rough itinerary and some sort of theme to go by. I used to think that themes are plain cheesy. Stuff like Shanghai themes, pink/blue/gold themes etc have been used ad nauseum. I'm pretty excited by what we decided on. =) I realise now that perhaps, themes aren't as cheesy as I thought. They kind of serve a function even - to streamline the planning process, and ensuring innately that the aesthetics fit well together. You might not end up with a stunning piece of eye-candy, but at least you probably will not end up with an eye-sore either - not unless the theme colour happens to be a lurid, shocking pink.

Finally! I think we're set on the designer for Yanxian's wedding gown!

We visited Ted Collection at Sago Lane today. They aren't the typical wedding boutique, but rather a tailor that specialises in cheong sam, but have since ventured into wedding gowns. My first impression was that they were quite friendly - I received a reminder call from them yesterday that I have an appointment today, and we met up with the designer for some discussion as well. To be honest, they aren't cheap. $2700 for a wedding gown to rent, a tea dress to keep and an evening gown to keep. That being said, the dresses are all bespoke, so it's actually VERY reasonable. A good bespoke suit would cost half that price alone, to be fair. Their fabric is of reasonable quality, and I like the insurance I get that I'll be paying just a set amount for the dresses - compared to those wedding boutiques that lure you in with $2000 packages but slowly start charging you $70-90 per extra photograph, $600 for extra lace on the dress and so on. I prefer honesty and knowing what I'm getting into.

Anyway, it looks like we're treading down the path of doing it a la carte. We'll probably use their tie-up florist and make-up artist though. In this case, we pay the respective vendors themselves, and not the wedding boutique, so that's cool. And that's the actual day makeup/hairdo and bouquet/car decor settled! How cool is that!?

Need to settle the dress within these few months .. we've bought some magazines for reference, and possibly looking for a place that can make designs of dresses that we've seen in the mags. Problem is that almost all of these bridal shops are pushy. Pushy is just annoying, but some are plain dishonest (refer to my previous post on the Suntec city incident). Makes dealing with them a real pain. I'm really keen to take our own photos, but Yanxian thinks that my skills don't cut it. =( Oh well.

Ooh we bought a few bridal mags yesterday from PageOne. The overseas mags are a much better buy than the silly local ones. For one, the models look more normal (read: not anorexic!) and of course, you are spared the visual bombardment of the same adverts again and again. The clothes are also more interesting, since they don't follow the same trends as the locals. Fun!

Ah, things are in the works now!

We've already decided on our banquet venue, and are in the process of getting the menu sorted out. It's going to feature their very excellent dessert buffet, and the difficulty is now in making sure the dessert doesn't overshadow the mains. And yes, of course there'll be chicken for the mains. We're toning down the number of mains that'll be served on that day - less food, but better presentation.

Should be aiming for paperwork to be done in 2-3 weeks' time. We made a quick detour to their ballrooms last weekend and bumped into their wedding banquet sales manager and one of the chefs. As it goes right now, we'll be taking up 2 ballrooms with a dance floor in the middle. Unfortunately because the Raffles Ballroom can be split up, there will most probably be another wedding right next to ours. We're also going to fix the pre-dinner reception - they have a really handy bar counter and VIP room available for us right outside the ballroom.

Yay ...

Venue, Part I

After some discussion with Dad, we're more or less set on Swissotel The Stamford! The cost is within budget, and of course it's of sufficient capacity. The only grouse I've seen so far on discussion forums is that they don't offer as many extra perks compared to other hotels, but then again .. perks aren't always that great or important. Have contacted the sales people there, and we'll see what we can do about the menu. I'm not really that hot on a traditional sit-down Chinese dinner, especially when the forte of the chefs there isn't Chinese. Their ballrooms are a tad sterile though, as they are usually used for conventions etc, so hopefully the decor people can work some magic on that.

So for this week, pending reply from Stamford regarding what we want. We might pay a deposit next week or in a fortnight to guarantee the date. And next up will be finding the gown.

About the dance ... we're planning for a dance floor, definitely, for the dinner. It'll take the space of some 10-15 tables I think, depending on how big it'll be. The idea is that since a fair bit of our guests are actually dancers - ballroom etc - we'll just get the DJ/band (if we can afford one ..) to cycle through various genres of music for people to take to the floor. We'll also be doing a couple of dance items. Yanxian was very keen for rhumba since it's so romantic, but I must profess that it's not one of my strongest latin dances. So we'll probably end up with 2 dances - rhumba, and lindy hop. And thereafter, a mix of latin (cha cha, jive, samba), classical (waltz, tango, foxtrot), social (square rhumba, salsa, bachata, jazz/lindy) and of course a bit of the regular club music. Sounds good?

This is very pleasant, preparing for the banquet. A nice silver lining amidst everything else. =)

We're now at the stage of preparing our guest list and subsequently searching for a hotel. Currently we stand at a minimum of 50 tables, according to my dad (he and his business friends etc etc), so there aren't many ballrooms to choose from - a blessing in itself! More or less we're thinking about Meritus Mandarin. We're doing a conservative budget of $1000 nett or so per table, it's just foolish and ridiculous to pay too much. (chances are, it might go beyond that.) Alas! I'm actually very interested in the Ritz. It has the capacity, and the look I want, but it's simply too expensive.

I actually don't want a traditional sit-down Chinese 9-course thing. How many times have you gone to such an event, gotten really full by the 6th course, tired by the 8th, and spent less than 5 minutes with the bride and groom? Eeeks. No, I don't want that. And I'm glad my parents are also all for getting rid of the ridiculous going from table-to-table photo-taking thing. =) We'll see how it goes. Yanxian actually had this really great idea of a themed party, like a masquerade. I'm pretty sure many of the younger folk will be game, but the problem will lie with the older ones, which unfortunately will probably take up much of the attendance.

More to come!

Whoa, the clearing-up was quite something to be reckoned with! We put some memorabilia into the ang pao box that Felicia so painstakingly made for us, and tried as best as we could to stash away everything else. 

Computer's still down, so just a quickie. Photos stolen from Andrew's and uncle Dennis' Facebook, for the benefit of those who don't have access to them!

Yay! We're legally married! Up next: preparations for the tea ceremony and wedding dinner!

The day is here at last!!

Completed!

We got our laundry back, and wow! It was quite a relief that nothing serious went wrong, after the horrible week. I was told that 1) the bra cups could deform 2) the rhinestones could fall off or lose their shine. Thankfully, neither happened. I am impressed with the ladies there - for future reference, this was at Jelita Drycleaners on the 2nd floor. Highly recommended. 

This has been somewhat a terrible week. Maybe as it draws closer to the date, my tolerance for slip-ups decreases drastically. I am now blogging using Yanxian's MacBook, as mine is now DEAD. Yes. Dead. With my last backup 2 weeks ago, this means that my edited photographs, songlists and others are now gone. I was plugging my computer into the printer outside, when it just went dead. Subsequently the computer couldn't detect the startup disk - probably a fried harddisk!! Thankfully, I still have all my RAW images on backup and on the SD card - I'll have to do post-processing again, but at least the photos are still there. Last night, Yanxian re-downloaded the wedding songlist and re-edited the important songs using GarageBand. 

Hen & Stag Parties

My, what a weekend!

Just a little filler before the weekend thing - we spent 2 days at Jubilee Road doing our shoots in our makeshift home studio! I rented 2 very excellent lenses from Desmond, the Canon EF 24-70 f2.8L USM and EF 70-200 f2.8L USM. It turned out to be an excellent decision, even though it set me back by quite a bit. The images were contrasty and tack-sharp, and on hindsight I could have just made do with the 24-70mm lens. The second lens had a focal length that was just too long for my cropped factor camera body, althought it produced really flattering portrait shots at the long end of the zoom.

Here's a pic of the makeshift studio!

Yanxian's very ghetto dressing table. That lamp is actually my continuous flourescent light that is used for product shots.


The shoot covered 2 days - the first shoot was done in casual clothes, but alas! I initially set the camera to shoot in small jpg files while I was doing the lighting adjustments, and later forgot to set it back to RAW! Felt really sore about it, but thankfully the images were nothing to shout about anyway. The good thing that came out of this shoot was that it prepped me for the following day's shoot, and as a result things were done much faster as I was more familiar with the lighting adjustments and ratios.

We went back the next day with our ROM attire and a few other props. The main concept for this shoot was to do a series of seamless high-key shots, and some off-camera crosslighting as well.

Urgh. Feeling annoyed.

We were planning for a photoshoot tomorrow, and all of a sudden Yanxian's boss magicked some meeting for her and it has to be cancelled. After all my preparation too!

Just had to rant.

The last few things ...

Touch up Yanxian's dress tonight (some of the rhinestones that were set earlier by iron fell off .. )
Indoors photoshoot this Thursday 16/4/9 by moi
Send clothes to dry cleaner's this Friday
Finalise wedding vows
Call Prof Low by this week

I'm not being OCD about the photoshoot, Yanxian. I just want to make sure everything goes exactly the way I want it.

Anyway, I do not see how much difference there is between me doing it and engaging some photo guy to do it. Wei has very graciously offered to help us take the photos! OK, obviously for the banquet day itself I can't possibly be part of the thing and do the photos as the same time. I'm hoping Chris' work will turn out to be to our satisfaction, and that'll probably be the banquet day photographer settled. If not, we could always get Black Box (they should start giving us a DSO Labs package discount already!)

I'm actually planning for a rather elaborate shoot. But whether it actually churns out award-winning photos .. that's another story altogether. =) I went absolutely nuts and bought an el-cheapo studio strobe. I'm still trying to digest that one now.

We did some finishing touches to the pen stand last night. In keeping with the sea-shelley theme, we wanted the pen stand to sit inside a giant clam shell - the same one which I gave Yanxian some 7 years ago. We'd then use vermiculite to fill up the gap and to conceal the original penstand gap, and adorn it with something sparkly. Problem is vermiculite tends to scatter all over the place, so I bought some clear sealant spray and did a bit of art and craft the other night. The spray was weird though, and it took an hour and several tries to get it right. It tended to make the vermiculite grey... eeeeeks. It was alright in the end, phew.

As promised earlier, pics of the wedding bands!! OK, something is VERY wrong with this picture. It came out kind of soft.

Hmmm, it's great that everything for solemnization is falling into place. Which leaves us with planning for the tea ceremony-cum-wedding-dinner day... Oh, did we mention that the date is sorta fixed? 21st Nov 2010 (Sunday). 

Yay!!! We finally collected our wedding bands tonight! =D And we could still fit our fingers into them, after 3 months. The only thing is, the things actually came in little ZIPLOCK bags. OM. For the money we paid, you'd think that they would at least come in plastic boxes, if not acrylic. The lady took them out from their very ugly bags, and put them into a nicer box. Oh well. At least they gave us a free ring pillow. Pics to come when I get the luxury of taking photos.

The seeds are finally here! Was thoroughly excited about it. Anyway, the packets were actually smaller than I expected them to be (250 seeds look like a teaspoon's worth of stuff) but it was fun mixing them up. The pic below is the mixing stage.



So what's in the mix?
- Zinnia elegans 'Lilliput Mix'
- Strawflower
- Nicotiana alata (Flowering tobacco)
- A selection of morning glory varieties: 'Carevale di Venezia', 'Crimson Rambler' and 'Milky Way'
- Arroyo lupine
- Love-in-a-mist
- Four O'Clock
- Sunflower 'Autumn Beauty'
- Marigold
- Cleome 'Violet Queen'
- Some fragrant herbs: Basil 'Genovese', dill, borage, sweet marjoram, black cumin
- Okra 'Burgundy'
- Amaranth 'Golden Giant'
- Portulaca
- Balsam: a selection of heirloom singles and doubles from my own garden
- Cosmos 'Bright Lights'
- Another Cosmos variety from my garden, I have no idea what it is. Bright yellow stuff.

A few lucky people will be getting some zucchini seeds and love-in-a-puff (Cardiospermum) seeds. The whole thing is entirely random of course, so not everyone will get the same stuff. They were packed into the bottles (remember we were busy tying ribbons to bottles a couple of months back?) with some vermiculite that had been soaked in nutrient solution. I'm guessing each bottle should have an average 50-70 seeds. Ha .. I'm going to cheat a bit and put extra lupine and cleome seeds into Aaron's. (BTW, did the cleome ever germinate?)

I'm starting to get worried about the seeds. Diane definitely sent them out, but no news so far and it's been 2 weeks! If, by the end of next week, I still don't get anything in the post, it's time for drastic measures.

Anyway, we're fretting about the music now. Weijian's keyboard is too soft, and the club won't let us plug it into their sound system. I'll see if we can get a mic or something, but there's still the issue of interference. And that silly woman at RSYC takes FOREVER to reply to emails.

On something more positive, I've finally done up the prototype for the penstand! Not that it's a big deal, since it's an extremely simple thing to do, but I just had to test it out.



And I had the chance to use my new light tent. =)


Yanxian is also almost done with her wedding vows, and once again I've got the rough thing in my head, but just need to write it down on paper.

Yes, the meet-up with Sylvia was most fruitful. I like her, just about everything we asked for, she was ok with it. It's rare to see administrators who are so decisive and spontaneous about guests' requests. Now, we just need her confirmation about things. One thing abt her though, she doesn't seem to like replying to emails. Argh. It'll be easier if we have a written record about things. Oh well, nobody's perfect.

Finally met up with Sylvia, the sales manager at RSYC yesterday, to discuss some of the finer and final details. We fixed up the outdoors seating arrangement, and she'll be sending us the indoor blueprint so we can finalise the table arrangement too. It seems like we'll be taking up most of the restaurant, oops. We'll need to decide on the bouquet throw though - she said that doing a re-entry would actually be weird. Haha .. Ying Kai!! Where did you come up with that??

Another sneak preview time!!

Yanxian and I did a DIY pre-wedding photography session yesterday, and I am pleased with the results. There were only 5-6 keepers, but these are great IMHO. By the way, I nicked the hydrangeas from my garden. =) Not too bad for a non-pro wedding photographer eh?

Still waiting for the seeds to arrive - should be here any day now. The good thing is, the vermiculite has almost finished drying. Now I'm starting to wonder if I should have spiked the vermiculite with low dose gibberallic acid - it'll do wonders for germination, but people will end up with lanky plants.

Feeling somewhat annoyed too by the slow response on the RSYC side - I've been bugging them for a meet-up so that I can finalise the decor with Peng Tze. Heck, I'll just go ahead today and settle it with Peng Tze anyway.

As an aside, we're going to have a break this weekend!! =) Really looking forward to it - thanks for the suggestion, Yanxian. We'll see if we can take the chance to do a couple of shots!

Got a few things done over the weekend! After getting the vermiculite, I thought of soaking them in something to coat the stuff with goodies so that they can behave as slow-release fertilisers. So I dumped a batch into a solution of 30-5-5 nitrogen fertiliser and a vitamin B solution, and now they are in the process of drying out. I dug out a store of seeds as well, and to my surprise I actually have quite a bit of viable seeds stashed away. Most were collected through the years, including a few memorables ones which I bought from Morrison's in Glasgow. Now I'm just waiting for the real batch of seeds to arrive from Diane's, and we'll be packing the vermiculite-and-seed mix into the bottles as gifts.

I'm just hoping that people will actually grow them. I realise not everyone likes growing plants. But hey - it beats giving stuff like keychains right?

Yay, finally got hold of the vermiculite! I don't know why, but it was extremely difficult getting hold of any. I repeatedly visited several nurseries at Thomson, Ang Mo Kio, even at Sembawang, but to no avail. Finally I just bit the bullet and went straight to a hydroponics supplier and got a gigantic bag of the stuff today.

Now I'm just waiting on my seed order to arrive. Unfortunately, Singapore has suddenly become a major crop-producing hub in SE Asia - or you would otherwise be led to believe, given the amount of NEW red tape that our dear AVA has installed to prevent people from tending plants and saving the earth. I realised that I had to pay S$120 for a phytosanitary certificate for some packets of seeds from a reputable nursery in the US (which I suppose in AVA's eyes harbours copious amounts of Fusarium wilt fungus, aflatoxin, colorado beetles, aphids and bacterial blight). Bleargh. Anyway, I ordered from a new source, which should arrive in a week or so (fingers crossed).

Oh yeah - we've decided that other than our Bali photos, we might venture into doing a little photography ourselves. What we're doing now is scouting around for venues etc and doing some test shots, then we'll rent some equipment and do a shoot - should be fun! It might not be in time for our ROM, but it'll be fun nonetheless. So last weekend, other than my mushroom thingy, we headed down to Kent Ridge Park and took a few test shots.



It's nowhere as professional as the pros, but hey, it's all about the fun! This session was kind of impromptu though, so we didn't go prepared with insect spray and quickly became mosquito fodder.

Ah hah, I've got quite a few updates here. We had our engagement party last Friday at Attica, which was really quite fun - if only I wasn't in a state of near-fainting from the stummy ache!!

Anyway, on Saturday Yanxian and I went on yet another romp at Pearl Centre. The place is an absolute gem for what we set out to do. Just months ago, Yanxian's favourite haunt for Swarovski crystal beads and beading supplies were Arab Street and Beads@Work respectively. Now, we found out that Pearl Centre has at least 4 very well-stocked shops selling these crystal beads at (if you'll believe it) even better prices than Arab Street. We went home with more of these hot-fix rhinestones by Swarovski at bulk prices.



Better yet (for me, the poor fiance-turned-tailor) I managed to lay my paws on this inexpensive rhinetone applicator.



The freaking applicator sped me up by more than 10x, and swiftly paid for itself simply for the convenience of it. As a result, I completed Yanxian's dress that evening! Hahahaha. Feeling very proud of myself. I'm not really sure what Yanxian was doing at that time though ... some belt or hair thing I think.

I also managed to buy the pen stand on Sunday at Bras Besah. That'll still need a little working on.

And finally, we have met with the 2 shortlisted florists, and decided to go with Peng Tze. He's actually this ice sculptor who also manages an events-decor company, and a real easy-going chap who's good to work with. I like the fact that he's not pushy about getting us to get more flowers or whatever - more of the contrary actually. He was giving suggestions like we don't need certain centrepieces (which the other florist was charging at $80), and even gave tips on the chair arrangement. The downside to it however, is that his style is really quite classic. I don't mean in the cheena sense, but just classic. Like what you'd expect at a company dinner, not at a DKNY runway show or something - i.e. staples, rather than chic. That's perfectly fine with me, however, since we weren't budgeting for extravagant decor anyway. The only problem came for Yanxian's hand bouquet - I'm sure Peng Tze would have provided a lovely bouquet, but I was really looking for something a little different and a little more fun for that one. I guess I'll somehow come up with doing it myself.

Update time! (I'm shuttling between 2 blogs, so pardon me if I get confused sometimes.)

We went back to Chinatown yesterday to pick up several things - Yanxian's waist ribbon, more ribbon for our informal photoshoot (photographer being yours truly), beads and some hot-fix crystals for the dress. I actually suspect that Yanxian is using the wedding adornments as an excuse to buy more beads. Hah.

We decided to adorn Yanxian's dress on our own! Got our hands on some inexpensive Swarovski crystals which we'll be placing on the dress. I went onto Youtube to find out how exactly to do it, since the auntie at the beads shop sounded really iffy about how to go about doing it. So this morning I did a prototype - first on a scrap of tulle material, which worked really well. So I did 2 more on the dress itself, and oooh, it's actually quite nice. Shall post before- and after- pics soon.

Oh, and we picked up a tux for the naughty boy. He looked so totally endearing in it! Shame that he can't come though, he would have made such a cute ring-bearer. =)

OH YES. WE RECEIVED OUR PHOTOSHOOT ALBUMS!! Our thanks once again goes to Mario, Thea, Lennie and everyone at Aditi Niranjan for doing such a fantastic job. I keep hearing how my friends hated the pre-wedding shoot sessions, but these people really made it quite an enjoyable affair. Previews, anyone?






These are the raw photos - unedited shots, and they sent a total of 2 albums totaling 80 edited shots, 1 large canvas print, and a 30 minute behind-the-scenes video which was really awesome. Not that the videography was fantastic or anything, but it captured a lot of funny stuff that went on, such as the 2 failed attempts before we got that shot above (I appeared to be eating boobs at one point in time ...) and of the horse going wild at the beach. Mario also knew I'm kinda into photography, so he very nicely obliged and sent me 2 DVDs containing all the original shots (some 600 of them, I believe) in TIFF format so I can edit and print as I want to - which is very professional and kind of him, as most of the local photographers I know only return you a selection of shots.

Finally, the invites are completed! Many thanks to HY's mum, Wei, Xuan and last but not least, HY! Everybody chipped in, and they couldn't have been done so nicely and so quickly if not for everyone's efforts. Haha, I finally realised yesterday, what a klutz HY is at handicraft. Can't even cut in a straight line even though I already printed out the line for him to follow! Wow. Hey, but he made up for it with his lovely handwriting, which is exactly what I lack.

Finally collected my shirt! Quite pleased with it.