She says: Wedding Keepsakes

Now that our wedding is officially over, the only things that remained is the memory. So what’s more exciting than doing a wedding scrapbook! Collecting all the remaining trinkets from our event, the invitations, booklet, favor and all the pictures! I’m getting all excited!

Furthermore, Clarissa and I had lunch today at Plaza Singapura and we visited the newly renovated scrapbook store, Made with Love. They had fantastic collections of scrapbook items! Plaza Singapura has officially become the Scrapbook Haven in Singapore! With the delicious Papermarket in the basement and 2 stores of Made with Love in level 3, the scrapping competition is fierce! Not too far from PS, there is the Cathay where Wood Would nest.

I stole this fun picture from Made with Love’s blog

I got to think how lucky the modern girls are. These scrap-booking products are dreams come true for journal and collage lovers! I used to make my own collage when I was young, by cutting each letter from different magazines. Now you can just buy them, tear off and stick! Everything is super easy!

However, I find it difficult to buy these ultra-cute products. The creative part of me rejects the notion of instant gratification of an artwork. The buy-tear off-voila look doesn’t appeal to me. Although it is really tempting to buy those ready-made layout pages, I can’t find my own print in those templates. One of the tagline of these ready-made layout is : We did all the work, You have all the fun! True enough. Although it makes me wonder, who’s having fun? Fun is doing the work!Anyway, I will still do the keepsake and having nice ready-made tags wouldn’t hurt!

Earlier during my wedding planning, I bought this gorgeous MY WEDDING folder from Kikki.k @ ION to contain all my collage pictures and also for keepsake. However, when I wanted to do the keepsakes of our wedding, I am stuck with my old pictures cut-outs. I can’t move on to do the keepsakes with the whole planning materials sitting in the same folder. I know it sounds crazy, but I need to start a fresh one with new folder. I will keep this folder to house my mountainous collection of research.

I am already eyeing on Darcy Miller’s Wedding Keepsakes.

How will you preserve your wedding memory?

She says: Childhood + Couple Montage

Another montage that I did for the wedding banquet.We had 3 videos and 2 special items during our banquet dinner, which can be potentially chaotic and too overwhelming for our guests. But BIG kudos to Conrad staffs, the sophisticated assistant director Ms Catheryn Tan, and our superb banquet manager, David. They met with us on our event 3 days prior to it, and made substantial changes to our initial plan. They made our event silky smooth and the timing was fantastic.

Anyway, due to the nature of my job, I always pay extra attention to photo montages in weddings. Some are not so pleasant, while most of it are okay and bearable. With all due respect to all the couples here, I totally appreciate your effort to put together a decent photo montage with whatever software knowledge you have. Not that I can balance out Profit & Loss Statement myself or pass science paper every time. Each (wo)man to her own.. Point taken.

So this is my craft, not that fancy, but I love it :

The last part is clip of Winston singing at Timbre during our proposal.

She says: Vintage Themed Album by Ian Photography

In the beginning of this wedding preparation, I was so in love with Max Wanger‘s style of photography, and so did Andrian. Thanks to him, we fulfilled our desire to have prewedding picture Max Wanger’s style. He made Saddle Club in Bukit Timah looks like a summer in Savannah, Georgia!

Now that he has successfully launched his career as wedding photographer, he added a crucial selling point. The customized album!With my uber-creative younger sister, Irene, joining him as his partner-designer-art director-fiance, they made an album which is totally my style! It’s ultra gorgeous!

Nepotism is a treat in wedding business. She knows my taste more than anybody else.

Check out their blog here.

She says: That’s When I Love You..

I was planning to sing to Winston this quirky-romantic song that he loves. But thanks to my self-consciousness and knowing my own limit, I decided to do what I know best. Video editing.

When we took our pre-wed pictures with Ian Photography, we already have this song in mind and we want to tell a story based on this song.The idea is to match the photo to the lyrics, and Ian do the video editing for us.

But the surprise came when I dedicated this song to Winston. The song’s lyrics really special because it spell out our daily activities.

So enjoy this romantic video :

She says: How to do Outdoor Wedding?

Since we have successfully done our outdoor wedding, I am convinced that everyone can have a beautiful outdoor wedding. But I have to warn you, it’s a real pain if you are not prepared or you don’t have the crucial elements. I will share with you in the later part of this post.

Reciting wedding vow under a majestic tree or by the sea while the sun sets are uber-romantic. But are we prepared to pay the cost? Here’s my tips on how to do an outdoor wedding:

1. Location – Very crucial. Your venue sets the tone of the whole event. I always knew I wanted a garden wedding under a majestic tree. So when we scout for venue, I am constantly looking for the suitable tree. After hunting in 8 different spots, my heart wobbled when I found our tree in OMSQ.

Many people turned off after they visited OMSQ . It is very raw and challenging. On the other hand, it was the rawness of OMSQ that inspired my design sense.

So what type of outdoor bride are you? Beach, garden, half indoor half outdoor?

Restaurant with outdoor feel like Suburbia or Verve?

Two more important thing: Research and Recee (Location scout).

2. Coordinator / Organizer / Planner. After you have decided on the location, think of how you can make this outdoor wedding happened? Who will help you to do the decor? Most of the Singaporeans will think of utilizing their closest friends to help them, instead of hiring a professional planner or coordinator.

After my own wedding, I stand here before you to advise, please get a professional planner or at least coordinator. Unless you have friends that does wedding professionally, please don’t make your life or your friends’ miserable.

I attended a wedding planning course for almost 10 months to learn about the professional and proper way to organize a wedding. Hence Winston and I set a wedding planner standard for ourselves. Almost all of our vendors were amazed by the detailed schedule or planning. Simply because we have learned from the best in the industry. Yet for my actual day wedding, I need help from a professional coordinator, Lily from Ly’s Wedding Diary. Please bride-to-be, don’t coordinate your own wedding. You can handle the preparation, but not the actual wedding.

I am very blessed to have friends that work as a wedding planner and coordinator. Lily, our coordinator-cum-classmate in the wedding planning course-cum-church friend, agreed to help me on the actual wedding coordination. My only regret is that I didn’t brief Lily in specific details, as I am the only one that planned and designed it. I didn’t translate that well enough to my decor team and Lily. Fortunately Lily is experienced and my team decor is a group of designers and artists too. They can run the wedding on their own!

As a matter of fact, when you are too involved in the absolute details of your wedding, you can’t concentrate on the actual wedding ceremony. I speak for myself. On my outdoor wedding, I am still re-arranging the centerpiece and making sure the cotton candy machine runs well. During my matrimony, my focus was scattered by the bees that was swarming my altar arrangement.

3. Vendors - This can be the ultimate headache to deal with. For outdoor wedding you need to at least have:

• Tentage/Logistic vendor – if your venue has no indoor shelter, this is a must-have.
• Decorator – if flowers are your main decoration, hiring a florist is enough. But if you want to be original and unique, hire a wedding designer to design a holistic look. This person will also help you to decorate the venue on actual day. Save you a huge headache.
• Coordinator/Planner- get a day coordinator or wedding planner if you have the budget. If no, get the most willing and organized person in your circle of close friends.
• Catering – they will help you provide the tables as well. Can work together with the decorator to achieve a coherent style.
• Sound system
• Photographer – preferably the photojournalistic style to capture the moments naturally.
• Videographer

The rest are your usual vendors, like bridal studio, car, etc. For the wedding dress, please choose dress with short train or dress with a hook from the longer train.

4. Wet Weather Plan - whether you are getting married in the hottest month or rainy season, please have a wet weather plan. A few days before our wedding, Orchard Rd was flooded until half a meter deep because of the heavy rainfall. Whatever your belief is, having faith for a good weather is not enough!

5. Cleaning Up -  This is very, very crucial. We had a minor setback after our outdoor wedding ended. The security guard of Fort Canning made a big hoohaa, about the mess, although the vendors was scheduled to clean up the day after. Brief your vendors in advance of what they should clean post-event.

Ok.. so far that’s what I remembered.. I will add more when new things come to my mind.

She says: Candid Pictures by the Guests

While we are still waiting for the official photographers to give us the pictures, we want to share the pictures taken by our friends. Justin, one of my college mate, used to work at Vocare Media, a wedding videography and photography company in Singapore. So he also took lovely pictures of the event. Outdoor wedding is about eye candy.

Here’s the pictures by Justin Choo:

This garland was designed by my talented roommate, Clarissa. Made by the guys from our cellgroup during the craft day. Thank you Riska and Yongfu who made this photo gallery possible!

Our catering vendor, Kriston contributed to the whole color scheme by providing us with blue tiffany color desserts. I love the L-O-V-E plates that we bought from Canada. Too bad the cotton candy machine didn’t work as much as we want it. We forget to buy the satay stick to make the cotton candy! Luckily the guys from Kriston was quick to response and they used the extra chopstick from Laksa stall.

Love Jane’s rustic bouquet and Jayson’s grey vest.

This is my money shot. The reason why we chose OMSQ as matrimony venue, is in these shots.

Balloons!! I love it! Thanks to Jesse & Lala’s wedding, I got this mass balloon release ceremony from their wedding. Singaporean, don’t forget to apply license to CAAS if you want to use this idea.

She says: Sneak Peek of Outdoor Wedding

We are still thinking of how to display our actual day photos. We had 2 official photographers and dozens of unofficial ones. The latter part has made their way to my facebook account and help me broadcast to all our contacts.

Our outdoor wedding is a treat for photographer with lots of beautiful details and thoughtful arrangement. I designed it that way and it came to pass nicely with the help of  our helpers and vendors.

Meanwhile here is the sneak peek preview from Ian Photography:

More pictures to come!

She says: It’s Showtime!!!

Our awesome weddings have just officially ended! We can’t asked for a better wedding for both outdoor and indoor. It exceeded everyone’s expectation including us. It’s truly and simply because of our friends and helpers that made it come true. We are so thankful to have such a strong team and group of close friends that are not only super creative but also very helpful.

We will feature our wedding in sequence, starting from our beautiful outdoor wedding to our most memorable wedding dinner. Oh lala, we love our wedding and we won’t be shy to show it!

We try to feature every details possible. We learned so much from it and we will use it as reference to move forward in our future step. These valuable lessons need to be learned the hard way. Since we experienced it first hand, we are able to advise other couple to beware of these traps!

But first, let me start by featuring our wedding with a teaser:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, sit back and enjoy our very own wedding highlight by the talented team from Alvinadeline!!” :

This video received the second highest compliment on the wedding banquet when we first showed it to the guests. We really love Alvinadeline’s track movement and film quality style. Great job, Alvin!

He says: Out of Singlehood and into Married Life!

Well… I have been waiting for quite sometime to write this so here goes….

Countdown to Wedding Day (19-06-10): TODAY’S THE DAY!!!!!

This is it, the big day! I have done what I could for the preparation, I don’t know what else I can do, so let’s believe that this weekend will be great and wonderful!

Thanks in advance to all the helpers who has contributed in one way or another to this occasion, just be glad I am going to be married only once!!

And thank God for giving us this awesome opportunity to unite as one!

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1 Cor 13:4-7

Hellen and I thank you all!

She says: “If it’s gonna be funny later, it’s funny NOW!”

Here I am, doing my last minute wedding signage and stressing over how to burn an audio CD at 5:46 am. These few days have been intensely stressful for both Winston and I. Yet at the beginning of this week, in Sunday service I was listening to a simple truth yet a revelation from a powerful man of God sent from Down Under. He said, ” If it’s funny later, it’s funny now!”. Sometimes we are fussing over things, so stressed up when we are in the midst of the trials or the hectic situation, that actually when it has passed, we looked back thinking, ” I was so silly back there!” and we laugh about it. After we gone through that difficult time, we realize we made it. So to him, if it’s gonna be funny after we pass this test, we should put that perspective into our current situation. While we are in the eye of the storm, we can smile.

Suddenly this Sunday school song rhymes in my head :

” With Christ, in the vessel. We can smile at the storm. Smile at the storm ….. as we go sailing home”

Childlike faith.

Here’s my 6 min artwork!

2 more days to go…