She says: It’s Party Time! – Pretty in Pink

Finally we had a proper house warming and baby shower to showcase our house & our little one. It was a good start with a pretty dessert bar designed and styled by me. It has been awhile since I put together a dessert bar, but I certainly haven’t lost it. Instead it gets better, because I have more time to prepare all the items. Taking inspiration from the lovelies in Pinterest, I came out with theme of Stripes-pink & gray to compliment my monochrome house.

Here are some of the pictures :

I transformed my dinner table into a pretty dessert bar. Love how the table cloth matches well with my grey curtain. Just between you and me, I designed my house in monochrome so it will blends well with any color so I can host pretty parties every time!

The items are cupcakes, marshmallow, cookies, strawberry dip, ferrero rocher, marshmallow pop (which I made myself! I will post the steps in the next post) and red velvet cake with mini bunting topper! I make the mini bunting topper to match the whole theme. So cute!

Marshmallow pop is a very good item to compliment your design, since it is easy to make and the colors just pops!

Love the cookies that my friend did for me, it’s simple and delicious.

The cookies on the right is DIY. I just took the butter cream and sprinkled it with pink non-parelis (you can buy it in any baker shop) and voila, you have pretty pearly cookies.

I bought cotton candy maker for such occasion, but turns out it didn’t really perform well. It was fun to try but the result is not so promising.

I learnt how to make pink-colored sugar for the cotton candy. You only need caster sugar and pink food coloring paste. Give a few drop and mash it together.

The cupcakes are from the caterer Xin Yi Ping. These are the selected ones, the rest is unacceptable in my table.

If you need any decoration or dessert bar for your party, please feel free to give us a buzz in winstonhellen@gmail.com. We will gladly work out something for you that doesn’t burns a hole in your pocket!

Another review about Xin Yi Ping catering, they have very good deals for their Baby’s First Month package. Free cupcake and ang ku kueh, on top of their usual dishes. I fell for that. After all, ordering cupcakes will cost at least another $3/pcs.

However, to be fair, their food, service and the free cupcake is pretty average. You can’t expect much from them. The food is so-so, their service is rather ok and the cupcakes are below average. I can’t make any complaint, because they delivered what is written, just without excellence. For me,  I won’t recommend them strongly for my future parties. But if you are not particular with service and display, you can consider them.

This is the setup and their cupcakes:

Lastly, I prepared a small door gift for my guests. A thank you card with 2013 calendar at the back. I can share the print file with you, if you ask me nicely Just email us at winstonhellen@gmail.com

She Says: We are Still Around Because Love is All Around

Finally! After non-stop wedding weekends  for 2 months consecutively, we have reached the end of our high peak wedding season.

It was a roller-coaster ride which is full of ups and downs, especially during this rainy season! I will one day write about having to manage your expectation when weather and acts of God is involved in your wedding. We had our painful share of the wettest scenario during a full outdoor wedding and trust me, it wasn’t easy to swallow the reality that you can’t have your dream outdoor wedding. In fact it can haunt you back if you don’t prepare to let go in the first place.

Many lessons and experiences we gained during this peak season, some amazingly fond memories and some was so traumatizing that it shook our passion of wedding planning and design to our core. Our patience and passion was being tested again and again. Despite all these, we are still standing here and marching forward. These are most valuable lessons that will be a strong foundation going forward. I may one day share with you about it.

One of the florists who has years of experience, told me that when the couple is nice, the flower will turn out to be better and looks nicer. Knowing that flower shipment is unstable, sometimes the flower blooms beautifuly and sometimes it looks dull, I took it with a pinch of salt. But after doing so many weddings, I couldn’t denied the facts that it was rather true! I wouldn’t say much about the characters, but rather the attitude towards marriage and to each other. Wedding shouldn’t be bigger than the act of marriage. Sometimes we can be too consumed with the wedding, the decor, the DIY stuff that we forget the reason we are having this wedding!

I can unapologetically say, that in my opinion, the best part of the wedding is the picture perfect, gorgeous decoration setup, before any guest steps in and anything starts. The perfect looking color coordinated dessert bar, tall glittery centerpiece, fun and creative props for photo booth. But that’s because I am very passionate about decoration and design. Wedding should mean much more than that!

At the end of the day, it’s not really that flower decoration that you remember, but the memorable moments in the wedding, the faces you see, the romantic moments with your chosen one.

The wedding will be perfectly wrapped in Love. As the Good Book said, Love Covers All.

To sum it up, LOVE  should be the main focus of a wedding. And don’t forget to let go and let God.. especially if you are doing an outdoor wedding in October- December. You will need a lot of that… Do check our latest works at Rosette Designs & Co here

He says: The Community

While Hellen links a lot of wedding-inspired websites and blogs in her posts, quite a few websites link to ours as well. In the course of looking through those websites, there are several cool sites out there that I believed will interest and inspire the BTB and GTB for the preparation of their wedding. I will like to share some of the interesting and quirky ones, so that YOU can be inspired and believed that the perfect dream wedding that you want is absolutely within your reach.

1. DIY Wedding | Craftgossip

Craftgossip is a wonderful network of sites that touches on different topics. DIY wedding is one of the newer sections and the sharing ranges from event decoration, invitation, cake toppers (my favourite!), table settings, guest books and wedding accessories. Very cool and in a way, quite minimalist as well. Highly recommended to check out!

2. The Urban Bride

This site is manned by a team of cool ‘urban’ ladies (well, seriously, there isn’t a lot of ‘rural’ gals in Singapore right?), showcasing cool, unconventional wedding, for gals that loved the ‘Sex and the City’ lifestyle. The only downside of this site is that, it has not been really updated for a few months… maybe it has been relocated?

3. Pinterest

Rather than a regular blog, this is more of a pin board for the entire internet community. See what you like from anywhere online and pin the picture and link on the wall! As simple as that, you can share your love out there. When you just need some inspiration, you can go there and check out the random stuff pinned. Hellen’s dollies envelopes are pinned!

And finally something that has nothing to do with wedding whatsoever…

4. Do Nothing for 2 Minutes

Are you panicking and your mind going all over the place with wedding preparation? Maybe you just need to calm down in this fast-paced world and the lead-up to the most important day of your life. Take 2 minutes of your life to take a deep breath and enjoy a moment of solitude and calm. One of the greatest joy in life is to enjoy doing nothing, don’t you think so?

She says: INSPIRED ME sections

I just finished my first post on the “INSPIRED ME” section of our Diary & Design Wedding’s blog. Since we have officially launched our wedding design + planning services, we wanted to share our tips and inspiration in that blog. We will still keep this lovely blog, but will be mostly on my reflection or thoughts regarding wedding. So if you are waiting for my DIY tips and tutorial, I will post it on D&D blog. We aim to keep our D&D blog alive and to help BTB and HTB in professional and insightful manner. Anyway, enough of the hard sell! (Geez.. I guess I really can’t make it as a sales person.)

This blog has been a documentary of our wedding planning and we will keep it alive with our client’s stories. Don’t worry, we still love, laugh and kiss!

Enjoy this new segment : INSPIRED ME and many other categories to come (P.S.: the first post is one of my fave part of wedding planning!)

She says: Introducing Diary & Design: A Wedding Story

After the success of our wedding, we received a lot of compliments and requests regarding wedding planning and design. It has always been my secret desire to cultivate my love for wedding design to a concrete plan. So, when Lily, my wedding coordinator asked to meet up to talk about the possibility to partner, I couldn’t feel more happy! This is the moment I’m waiting for!

It feels so right and so natural for us to plan & design wedding. I am always championing a life of passion and purpose. There is a purpose of why we are wired this way. Why we are born with certain tendency or talents. Some people are naturally drawn to numbers, sports, music, biology, or some cool ones, like design *haha*. I happened to be born with a love for art and design. I was an aesthetically-inclined child with tons of imagination. My mom can testified to that. She had to repaint the wall many times because of my constant sketching.

So now I know why I love and is able to do art and design, so one day I could help many brides to have a beautiful, memorable and stress-free wedding. Man, that was some revelation!

Anyway, enough of childhood flashback, now the future is in front of us. We are officially launching Diary & Design: A Wedding Story today!

Diary & Design Wedding combines the individual strength of a well-designed and well-organized wedding. You get the best of both worlds. Neither design or coordination becomes secondary. Both are given the same priority and full attention. This partnership provides assurance that all of your design and coordination needs are covered, so that you can relax and enjoy your big day.

We already drafted the services and packages to suit your preferences. We even have the Design-It-Yourself packages to help you materialize the ideas you are dying to impose but have no idea how to!  *Gosh, I wish I had that privilege when I planned mine*

UPDATE:

This post was written about 3 years ago, when everything is still in the infancy level. Now the ladies of Diary & Design Wedding are more mature and experienced, not to mention big thinker. So DDW is undergoing restructuring process and will be officially branch out into 2 companies, which each specialized in different area, wedding planning and wedding design. We have yet to officially announced it, but being a design junkie it is a no-brainer for me to head the new baby, Rosette Designs & Co, which specialized in event design & decor. Please check out our portfolio in our facebook page, while we work on our website.

No matter what is the company I am belong to, my love for design & decor is always prevails.

 

He says: Diary of a Married Man

I’m back!

…… hmm……

Ok.. so no one is really expecting anything interesting from me, but what the heck! It has been 3 weeks since our wedding, and we are still settling down into our married life routine. The wedding was surreal in a sense and I was glad everything went according to plan. I will leave the inspirations, photos, videos and decoration stuff to Hellen, she’s better at putting everything together. She’s not resting on her laurels too, as she has been hard at work doing something absolutely amazing at home. I’m sure she will be showcasing it when it’s done *wink*.

But surprisingly, everything seems to be going well in these initial weeks, and I look forward to seeing Hellen every night at the end of the day! I just want to dispel this myth once and for all: you do not need to take effort on a wedding, it is the marriage that matters.

Let me tell you this, spending time and effort working on a wedding is an incredible way for a couple to get closer together. As we spend more time working on this project of a wedding, we learn more about each other, how we handle finances, our ideas, our short-comings and our talents. Therefore, if you can afford the time and effort, take time from your busy schedule to plan a wedding together, you may learn to love wedding and each other even more! This is what we called a true-blue “DIY Wedding”!

Just don’t be like them…

Telepathy... Failed

She says: Photobooth Pictures

I am so pleased with our photobooth design. I designed the backdro. Although we are not happy with their way of treating my decoration when they transferred the structure to Conrad (they crushed my decoration!!), it looks great on camera.

Love the poses, especially baby Michela!

Read our process of creating this backdrop here, and my inspiration behind this photobooth wall here and here. This one is Winston’s inspiration.

Even my parents were spotted at the photobooth!

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: 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 :