The Wedding Limericks
Posted by Heather on September 1, 2003 at 10:00 PM
Tim and I decided to break from tradition a bit during our wedding reception. Rather than kissing whenever our guests tinked their glasses with their forks, we announced that in order to get us to kiss, we would need to hear an original limerick, themed around one or both of us and our wedding :-)
Did that dissuade our guests from trying to make us kiss? Definitely not! We heard some fantastic limericks and I think everyone enjoyed coming up with their own as well as hearing each others. Here are a few, in no particular order other than the order in which I have the little pieces of paper piled on which they were originally written (authors - if I got you wrong, please speak up! And Sarah - I need your YMCA limerick ;-) )
You'll also notice a somewhat recurring theme... something about... fire? Pizza boxes? Fire Extinguisher? Ah... but that's another story!
There once was a bride, name of Heather.
Whose laugh was as light as a feather.
The groom's name was Timmy.
He said with a shimmy,
"I do Babe, let's stick close together."
- Sir Vincenzo
You should not be bogged down with Zog!
We've known it all along!
Timothy and Heather
Together Forever
To Infinity and Beyond!
- Table 5, the "Buzz Lightyear" Table * (Gail, Phil, Sam, Kathy, Gretchen, Teresa, and Dewey)
There once was a woman who loved a roadie.
He was such a smoothie, she told me.
They danced all night,
Never putting up a fight;
They'll be together till they're oldies.
- Miss Juan
A cry rang out in the night;
There's fire, pizza boxes are alight!
Hither and fro,
water didn't flow,
A replacement extinguisher made it right.
- Sir Rich
There once was a poor guy named Tim
Whose life, though fulfilling, was grim.
But then he met Heather
And now in all kinds of weather
He's chock-full of vigor and vim.
- Dave
They've loved each other in several cities
They've sung together on several ditties
But what Tim loves the most
Something we'll all surely toast
Are her hair, her eyes, and her... cats.
- Dave (again!)
I once knew a good bloke,
Worked hard, and was always broke.
Long hair and a big nose,
his life changed and smells like a rose,
cause he's got a perfect match
and I can't find a clean word to rhyme with MATCH.
-Scott & Mark
There once was a guy named Tim
He met Heather and was living in Sin.
They were recruited by Bill,
Yet are together still,
And tonight, she married him.
- I think this one was Ross
There once was a man from nantucket,
who had 7 wives and a bucket.
I won't say the rest,
I think that would be best,
so Heather and Tim can look up it.
- I think this was Ross too :-)
Kiss kiss, kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss.
kiss kiss kiss, kiss kiss, kiss kiss kiss
kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss,
kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss,
kiss kiss, kiss kiss kiss kiss, kiss kiss!
- Miss Jenn
Heather as we know is upbeat!
And Tim is known to be neat!
Heather, could you humor us please;
Was Tim on his knees?
When he asked you to make his life complete?
-Sam
There once was a woman named Heather
Whose emails couldn't be longer.
And then came the distraction
A man who knows Action,
And the ops team couldn't be fonder!
- Gracie
There once was a woman who owned
An apartment with a very nice stove.
She kept pizza boxes in the oven,
and one day set fire upon them,
which explains the fire extinquisher her love one bestowed
- a late entry from Davwill. We kissed anyway :-)
* Tim and I have a little tradition of taking a "self portrait" with our digital camera whenever we go on trips; we wanted to encorporate this tradition into our wedding somehow. So instead of numbering the tables, we printed the pictures out and framed them, and used them to identify the tables for the seating arrangements. The picture at table 5 was taken at Walt Disney World Florida, with... you guessed it... Buzz Lightyear!
Planning our Wedding
Posted by Heather on August 8, 2003 at 9:34 AM
The Engagement
Tim & I were engaged on December 12th, 2002
We had been dating for 2 1/2 years. How we started dating is a completely other story that we'll probably tell somewhere else on our web site. How we met is also another story, and we'll save that too. It was the day before my birthday. We had just closed on a beautiful piece of property - the site of our future dream home! Little did I know as we were signing the papers that "future" was closer than I had thought! Tim proposed just after we left the realtor's office - in the parking lot, as a matter of fact, in the car :-) I think his exact words were "Well... since we're doing so much planning for the future and talking about building a house, maybe we should talk about getting married too". To which I responded "Yeah - maybe we should talk about it!". It was at that point that he pulled the ring from his pocket (which I later learned he had been carrying for a few days waiting for "the right moment") and said "Well, what do you think?". Ok... those are probably not even close to the exact words he actually spoke, but it captures the spirit of how it happened. To be honest I was WAY to excited to have thought about wanting to capture the exact words for remembering later. After I finished hugging and kissing him and squealing with surprise and happiness I said "yes"... and here we are :-)
Setting the Date and Choosing the Location - December 12th, 2002
First - a note of advice to other folks: If you can, do this in the REVERSE order (ie Location first, Date second) to save yourself some angst and to spare your significant other from feeling the brunt of that angst :-). More on that later.
Back to December 12th. Post proposal and of course, my acceptance, and after making some quick calls on the cell phone to his folks, my folks, and our real estate agent (who apparently knew the plan and insisted to Tim that we call her immediately to let her know my answer!) we headed out to dinner. We already had reservations at Spazzo's to celebrate the closing on the property. Of course, now it had become a celebration of our engagement!
So over tapas and wine we started discussing the next big question - "when". We were already planning a trip to Italy in September 2003 - we had made the reservations and everything. It seemed to make a lot of sense to turn that into our honeymoon. Great! Honeymoon from September 10th - 22nd, 2003 in Italy and it's already booked. Working backwards from that we settled on August 30th as our wedding date. It's a long weekend, which is great for folks traveling from out of town (and being from Canada with most of my relatives coming from Ontario and Newfoundland, that seemed like a good thing to consider). It's also generally a great time of year for a wedding in Seattle, weather-wise (weather is important to consider when planning on getting married in Seattle). It was a Saturday, which we both preferred because we knew we wanted an evening ceremony and lots of dancing and partying into the wee hours of the morning, and it was a whole nine months away which gave us plenty of time to find a location and plan! (Aha! Plan - yes. Plenty of time to plan. Finding a location - no. At least, not without a lot of angst! Are you starting to get a sense of what our first "crisis" was?).
Thus it was that August 30th, 2003 became our date. As mentioned, we decided at that time too that it would be an evening wedding, formal/semi-formal (or as close as one gets in the Pacific Northwest) and we also agreed a wedding planner was in order, to preserve our sanity :-) (And it has! She's been absolutely incredible. More on our planner, Lynne Fisse Walker, later too). And we also had some general idea about the kind of venue in which we would like to be married - not something ultra-glitzy, but some place elegant and appropriate for a semi-formal wedding; some place a bit "northwesty" if at all possible (ie with an interesting history, or a northwest feel to it), someplace that wouldn't feel empty or sparse with 80-100 people that we were roughly estimating would be the size of our guest list. We weren't terribly worried about finding something that would fit our criteria. After all, we had 9 months to plan and a big city and surrounding area full of venues. Yup. We were set.
So of course, we started advertising the date right away to all of our family and friends :-)
Dress Shopping - December 22nd, 2003
Seahawks 30, Rams 10. Matt Hassleback has a 300+ yard day. Wacky that I remember the date that I purchased my dress. It so happens that my folks and my sister were in Seattle staying with me for Christmas. And, the Seahawks were in town. So Tim had arranged to take my Dad to his first NFL football game - Seattle Seahawks vs St Louis Rams, December 22nd 2003. While I AM an avid football fan (thanks to Tim and his 2nd gift to me - "The Idiot's Guide to Football"... read it - it's great!) I thought that it would be a great "Bonding" thing for Tim & my Dad to go to the game, while us "girls" (me, my mom and my sister) went... what else? WEDDING GOWN SHOPPING!
Prior to becoming engaged I'd given absolutely no (ok, maybe about 15 minutes in fleeting fantasy) thought to what kind of wedding dress I wanted. After becoming engaged, and having purchased every Bridal magazine available in stores at the time, perused them all getting ideas for my perfect dress, I figured, of course, probably like all women until they get into one of those bridal boutiques and actually start trying dresses on, that it would be "something simple", "not too fancy", "elegant and classy but subdued".
In the 10 days since becoming engaged, I had also hit http://seattle.citysearch.com to compile a decent cross-section of Bridal boutiques (called those that required appointments), and thus I knew exactly where I wanted to go and had some idea of what I wanted my dress to be.
During those same 10 days we also got a taste of what it would be like trying to find a venue in Seattle (or anywhere I'm sure) on August 30th... not easy - lots of places were already booked and had been for months. But we still weren't panicked. After all, we still had more than 8 months! Plus we were going to hire a planner and she would figure all that stuff out for us! It'd all work out.
At any rate, 11am on Sunday December 22nd, armed with my list of "first-round" boutique selections (taking an approach similar to the NFL draft), my Mom, my sister and I headed out to the shops while my Dad, Tim, his mom and a friend of ours, Chris, (who is also Tim's Best Man) headed to the football game.
The stores I had planned on hitting in my first round were, in this order (because this was the order in which they were easiest to get to for me)
- I Do Bridal in Wallingford
- Marcella's La Boutique in Downtown Seattle (which is where we actually ended up getting the bridesmaids dresses)
- The Bridal Garden in Kirkland (which is where I ended up purchasing my veil, tiara, gloves, and earrings)
The first store also ended up being the last store we went to (in search of Wedding dresses, anyway). The sales person told me I broke some kind of record for finding my wedding dress. And it was NOT because I had looked at all those pictures in the magazines and had some sense of what kind of dress I was looking for. What happened to me was, I gather, pretty much the same thing that happens to every bride-to-be when finding The Dress. You try on a dress and you don't want to take it off, and that's how you know that it's The One. And it was NOT the "something simple", "not too fancy" dress that I had gone in thinking I wanted.
We went into the store, and the sales woman (who was wonderful) told me to go through the racks and pick a whole bunch of different styles - different necklines, bodices, skirts, detail, fabrics - and try them all on to get a feel for what looked good on me and what didn't. So that's what we did. I, along with my sister and Mom, started hauling out dresses - A-Lines, silhouette-hugging, Ball gowns, "mermaid" flared, Strapless, Capped sleeves, Halters, spaghetti straps, dresses with long trains, dresses with short trains, dresses with no trains, Lace dresses, satin dresses, dresses with intricate beadwork and embroidary, plain dresses, dresses with empire waists, dresses with natural waists, dresses with dropped waists, dresses that sparkled, dresses that shimmered... pulled 'em all out and started trying them all on.
I think it was the 12th or 13th dress I tried - after finding that I loved the way a dropped-waist made my waist look tiny, and after deciding beads and embroidery were a must after all, and after thinking an exact a-line although flattering wasn't quite "enough" but a ball gown was too "poofy", and a train might be kinda fun after all provided it's not too long... well. Armed with all of these preferences I had discovered after trying on at least a dozen dresses and commenting on each one, the sales woman walked over to the racks, shuffled a few dresses around, and then brought out The One.
I thought it was beautiful on the hanger... and once I put it on I knew it was The One. I couldn't stop looking at myself! I didn't want to take it off! My sister loved it too. And when I looked over at my mom, sitting on the bench watching as I swished and twirled, she was smiling and I think she was getting a little teary-eyed. Yup. This was The One.
I finally managed to convince myself I had to take it off.. got measured, filled out the forms, paid for it, and that was that. Mission accomplished. At least for that day.
As we got back into the car to head home I called Tim on his cell at the game to let him know we were successful. It was just over an hour of shopping I think... the game had just started for them. I told him I had found and ordered my dress, and I heard the chuckles in the background. I think the running joke, given how quickly I had found the dress, was that I'd actually bought it and had it on layaway for about a year ;-)
The dress that I bought was an Eden's Bridal dress. I don't see this particular style on the Eden's Bridal Web site anymore - it was there at one point but looks like it's been discontinued sometime in the last couple of months. BUT I was clever enough when I did find it on their web site, to have downloaded and saved a copy of the photo. This picture doesn't do the details justice though.
The Search for Bridesmaids Dresses - December 28th - January 3rd 2003
I wanted to find the bridesmaids dresses as well, while my sister was in town and able to shop with me, try stuff on, and give her approval :-) She is my Maid of Honour, after all. I want her to look good and feel good! And she was a good model for my other bridesmaids as well - I knew that if we found something Sarah liked, that Jenn and Eileen would as well.
I (naively) thought that the hard part was finding the Wedding dress. and if I had managed to find that in under 2 hours of shopping in the first store I went to, well... the Bridesmaids dresses ought to be a real piece of cake! Almost, but not quite :-) . Neither Sarah nor I found anything we really liked at the store where we had purchased my dress. So we headed off to the next store on the list - Marcella's La Boutique. They had a wonderful selection of dresses, and we went through the same exercise for Sarah as we had done for my dress. And... like it was with my dress, after about the 7th or 8th dress we tried on at Marcella's, we had found The Bridesmaids Dress. A beautiful Amsale gown, very silhouette-fitting with a beautiful flare below the knees. Very glamourous. It made my sister look like an old-time Hollywood movie star. Just gorgeous! We probably should have done then exactly what we had done with my dress - get measured, order it, pay for it, and then call it quits. But I wasn't ready to be done! It was over too quickly! So the next several days were spent going through magazines looking for more pictures of dresses, visiting more boutiques, trying on more gowns... store after store, gown after gown. We hit everywhere from Southcenter, to Seattle, to Wallingford (again - just to be sure) to Lynnwood. And what did we end up doing? Going back to Marcella's and ordering the bridesmaid dress we originally fell in love with. D'oh!
The Maid of Honour and Bridesmaids dresses are by Amsale. They are actually in red, not the brown shown in the photos below. Photos are from Amsale's web site, http://www.amsale.com.
So - before my family headed back home, I had purchased my wedding dress, and registered the bridesmaids dresses. Off to a good start. We still didn't know WHERE we were going to get married, but hey - we sure knew we were gonna look good for it!
The Wedding Planner - December 27th, 2003
I don't know HOW many times I've received the response, after telling folks that we hired a wedding planner "Cool! So... is she anything like J. Lo?"
Lynne Fisse Walker is not anything like Jennifer Lopez. Which, if you've seen the movie, is a very good thing. At least from my perspective :-)
Tim and I agreed early on that a wedding planner would be worth his or her weight in gold. We both lead extremely hectic, interrupt-driven, and randomizing work lives, and when not at work, or at the gym (my hobby) or playing golf (his hobby) we have little enough time to ourselves to just be with each other without worrying about being interrupted, or having to be somewhere or do something, or... plan a wedding. So it seemed to make a lot of sense.
The question - where to begin? None of our friends or family had used a wedding planner. So it was back to seattle.citysearch.com with a query for "wedding planners". That is where we found "The Last Detail" and Lynne Fisse Walker. She was actually on the 3rd page of the long list of results but I had quickly ruled out the first two pages because they were either not really wedding planners (just boutiques with personal service) or - and this is getting more and more important for all you wedding planners out there - they didn't have a web site. OR, perhaps even worse, they did have a web site but it looked like crap. I have to figure anyone who doesn't know how to get a professional looking web site out there in this day (even if they have to find someone to do it for them) isn't really serious about their business. And anyone not serious about their business is certainly not going to be serious about ours! It's kinda like reviewing resumes as a hiring manager. In fact it is exactly like that. There are a lot of you wedding planners out there (as I was delighted to find) so to whittle down the list to a manageable number, I'm gonna be looking for things like "do they have a web site" and "does it look like crap" and if the answer is no to the first or yes to the second, into the "trash" you go :-)
So, Lynne's web site, http://www.lastdetails.com is what first caught my eye. Polished, professional, easy to navigate, nice layout and design, and no broken links or images. Her web site was perfect right down to
Good sign :-). The 2nd thing that caught my eye was her experience (posted on her web site) - 10 years of event planning for Microsoft. Being in Seattle and being somewhat familiar with the industry I knew that meant a lot of experience dealing with a lot of very-type-A personalities :-) which would require a saint's amount of patience. Not to mention proven ability to work at an extremely demanding pace, in very public settings. I figured that if she could do that for 10 years and still look as calm and sane as she does in her photo, she can certainly handle our 80-person wedding. Sold! Well - at least on meeting with her to learn more :-)
We met with her a couple of days after Christmas. She came to the house, met myself and Tim and my folks, and we liked her instantly. She was prompt, organized, personable, asked great questions, and knew her business. We knew that this would work!
We hired her, and the first thing that she went to work on was... you guessed it... the location!
Location, Location, Location
At this point in the saga, it is the beginning of January. The Seattle Wedding show was in town so Tim and I decided to go and see if maybe we could make some headway with our location as well as scope out other things like cakes, prop rentals, music, etc. We knew Lynne would also be there, and that she'd be scoping out locations as well, but we figured we could do our part too :-)
So we headed downtown to the Exhibition Center. It was the morning but it was still pretty crowded. Gaggles of women everywhere - presumably sisters, friends, moms with the bride-to-be. talking and pointing and looking and talking and... talking! Not so many guys. However we did spot a few trailing behind some of the gaggles, so Tim started feeling a little more at ease :-).
We started seeking out venue booths immediately - gathering pamphlets and asking about availability... it got pretty discouraging pretty fast, right from the get-go.
We had gotten some ideas of venues we really liked from some of the local Seattle bridal magazines that were now on the shelf. Things that appealed to us and seemed to meet our criteria were places like the Monte Villa Farmhouse and other historic mansions and sites, or any of the local wineries. "The Space Needle", "The Edgewater Inn", and "The Chinese Room in Smith Tower" were also on my preferred list because they represented unique Seattle landmarks or history but when Tim and I had talked about them we had decided to rule them out. I don't exactly remember why we ruled out the needle - it just didn't really feel right to either of us I think. The Chinese Room, although I liked it, didn't really appeal to Tim - he wasn't really enthused about the style of the decor. And we ruled out the Edgewater Inn for a rather funny reason. Prior to his current career, Tim spent 15 years in the rock and roll industry touring with, well, just about everyone. And the Edgewater Inn has historically been a popular place for bands to stay when they're in town. It's got a story - which is exactly why I thought it'd be an interesting location. And it has links to Tim's former life, which I thought was kinda cool. But when I mentioned the possibility of The Edgewater Inn to Tim, his response was "Umm... probably not. Whenever I'm in the Edgewater Inn all I can picture are drunk rock stars and half naked women running up and down the hallways. Not something I'd really like to be picturing during our wedding". Uh... yup. Fair point. It came off the list right away ;-)
So, at the Exhibition center, we bee-lined for all of the venue booths that seemed to match our criteria - the historical farmhouses and mansions, the wineries. Denied. Everything was booked for August 30th. And we were told time, and time, and time again, that they generally book up at least a year in advance. But we hadn't been engaged for a year! We just got engaged in December! Who knew. (Probably most people, but we're not most people ;-)). A few places had the afternoon slot for the 30th still available. But we had our hearts set on an evening wedding. And a few places had some September weekends still available, but we had our hearts set on the 30th and changing the date was not an option in our mind. It seemed we were doomed.
So we modified our criteria. Maybe a glitzy hotel wouldn't be so bad. Lots of people get married in glitzy hotels. What was our problem with them anyway? We were just being silly. Why we thought a glitzy hotel would have openings on our date when all of these other venues did not is beyond me. But we did round 2 of the Exhibition Center, this time targeting the hotel venues. Again, denied. At every one.
It was beginning to look hopeless. I was starting to have my first bridal meltdown. (Not Bridezilla-strength by any means. Just a quiet little panic attack that Tim could tell I was having). He reassured me that everything would be ok. Not all of the venues in the area were represented here, plus we had Lynne on the case. It would be ok. It really would :-).
So - abandoning the search for a location, we decided to focus on something different. Cake. The rest of the afternoon was pretty much spent tasting cakes. At least, that's what I remember most after the mini-meltdown :-). And there were a lot of cake booths. I was in heaven. After all, what is a common woman-response to a crisis? Sweets, of course! After about a dozen cake samples I started to feel a lot better about everything.
t was at this point that we discovered Mike's Amazing Cakes. What attracted us to their booth was their "Topsy-turvy", "Alice-in-Wonderland" kinda cake... the one with the bride sliding off the top and the groom trying to keep her from falling. (Check out their web site - there's a picture there of it and all their other amazing creations!). That cake was Too Cool. At this point we hadn't even tasted their samples and we knew we wanted them to do our cake. Their marketing scheme had worked :-). But - we did taste their sample and it was absolutely divine. In fact, the sample flavour at the show is what we ended up choosing for our actual cake (white chocolate cake with orange-peach-schnapps mousse filling, and buttercream frosting). Although a close second, when we actually went for a real tasting later on, was the white chocolate cake with the strawberry-grand-marnier filling. It was tough to decide. I think had to have at least 3 or for pieces of each to make up my mind ;-).
We also saw some pretty cool looking props at some of the rental booths - beautiful lanterns, garlands, etc. But without knowing what our location would look like (because we didn't HAVE a location yet) we didn't spend a lot of time on those.
So we left the Exhibition Center with a nice sugar high, feeling rather satiated, and knowing who would make our cake. One detail down, about 3,479 to go. Excellent!
Gimme a "W"! Now What's that spell? "Whew".
Mid January. We were back from Disney World, Florida, where I had run my first full marathon (my first marathon of any kind. Hell - my first run of any kind!). The marathon managed to distract me at least for a little while from what I was sure was certain catastrophe. The idea that we might have to get married under one of the I-5 on-ramps if we couldn't find a location soon.
Lynne had been working on the location angle while we were gone. We had given her our modified criteria - northwesty if possible, unique, elegant but not overly glitzy (although we could make do with glitzy too if it came right down to it). And she had come up with 2 possibilities. Really. these were the only 2 places in the entire City of Seattle that were available for an evening wedding on August 30th. And they actually weren't bad choices - they were Salty's and The Fairmont Club.
Lynne put both locations on hold for us so we could go and visit.
Both Salty's and the Fairmont Club were nice places but neither really felt like "us"... we ended up leaving both with a "we'll let you know by end of week", and went home to think about it.
The more we thought the more we decided we wanted to keep looking. We called Lynne and told her so, and crossed our fingers that she would find something previously overlooked.
And wouldn't you know it - she did! She called us back, I think a day or two later, to tell us about The W Hotel. I had heard of the W chain - I knew it to be, from what I had heard, a fairly new, modern, and somewhat upscale chain of hotels that had popped up in the last few years. Both Tim and I had been hoping that we would find something NOT a hotel (don't ask me what we have against hotels - I guess we just didn't want to be married in one) but Lynne said "this one is a bit different. It's not your traditional crystal-chandaliered, gilded wall ornamented, parquet-floored ballroom. This has a different feel. Let me make an appointment so you can check it out". So we did, and she did, and we went!
As soon as we walked into the W Hotel Lobby, with its tall windows dressed in chocolate-brown velvet curtains, its modern furniture & decor, rich and dark hardwood floors, and subdued ambient lighting provided by blue-glass tea-lights and votives that were scattered absolutely everywhere, we knew this was the place.
We went home to sleep on it and the next day we called Lynne and had her call them up and finalize everything.
So now we had my dress, my bridesmaids dresses, our cake maker, and our venue... now we could get down to business!
Together With Their Families, Heather and Timothy...
I can't imagine how people planned weddings before the Internet was widely available! It's been a very key part of our entire wedding planning process. It's how I found the bridal stores to shop in; it's where I found our wedding planner; it's where I bought our planning books;It's where I found our favour vendors, and how I ordered them all. And it's where I found our invitation and program vendor and it's how I ended up ordering them (online), and how I knew what to put in them (searching for examples). I found www.youreinvited.com through another internet search. Later, as it turns out, I saw them advertised in a number of bridal magazines. But that wasn't how I initially found out about them. Gotta love the Internet!
We started out by looking through the bridal magazines, ordering free samples and catalogs, and checking out our local paper and invitations stores and saw lots of beautiful invitations but nothing that really lept out at us.
www.youreinvited.com will make custom invitations for you and you can order them online. Not sure how prices compare to other invitation places, but we felt we got our money's worth. We based the design on the yellow calla lily invitation they have on their web site. Tim actually selected that invitation from their site. I loved it too, and asked them if they could do it in red, to match the calla lilies that I will have in my bouquet, and to go with our "colours" of ivory, red, and gold. The save-the-date cards (gold card on the right) were purchased online from somewhere else (can't remember where currently ;-)). The people at www.youreinvited.com were so creative and had wonderful ideas for the invitations, all of which we loved, and they were extremely responsive to my questions and prompt with delivery. We also ended up ordering our programs from them as well - just a mere 3 weeks before the actual wedding.
Let Them Eat Cake
We started working on our wedding cake design fairly early with Mike's Amazing Cakes, and we had a lot of fun with it! It was an opportunity for us to apply a little creativity :-). We wanted something different and unique but still a recognizable wedding cake, and we wanted to incorporate two elements 1) the red calla lilies of my bouquet, our invitations,and our favour "mintz" and 2) an Italian theme to go with honeymoon trip to Italy.
What we came up with was a 3-tiered hexagonal shaped cake, topped with a bouquet of red sugar-calla-lilies with one or two callas scattered on each tier as well. On every other "face" of each hexagon on each layer, we will have an Italian fresco-style painting in full colour. Each "face" that didn't have a fresco painting would have gold sugar beads arranged in a pattern. All of the edges - vertical and horizontal - will be trimmed in gold beaded piping.
The pictures of the frescos we'll be using are below - a different one for each tier. Also below is a sample cake so we could see how the frescos would actually turn out on the fondant - unlike the sample cake the frescos on the real cake will be on the "side" faces, not on the top. The gold trim will be the same.
The way Mike's Amazing Cakes got the pictures onto the cake was by using a special fondant "printer". It's a device similar to a normal colour printer except that instead of printing on paper, it prints on fondant. And instead of using real ink, it uses edible colouring. Most cake places have these devices now - usually they're used for reproducing photos (eg baby pictures, anniversary pictures etc) onto fondant that is applied to the top surface of the cakes. If you search the internet on "fondant printers" you can learn a lot more about these things... that's how I knew what we wanted to do was even possible. For an example, check out the PhotoCake web site. Now - instead of using photos of people like in the examples on the photocake web site, we gave Mike's digital copies of the above images and you can see the results on the sample cake - very elegant!
The cake flavours and icing will be a white chocolate cake with orange-peach-shnapps mousse inside and buttercream frosting on the outside. The frescos will be done on fondant and laid over the buttercream. The sample we tasted was really yummy!
Do me a Favour?
Next stop - wedding favours. We anticipated a lot of out-of-town guests (my family is all in Canada; Tim has a number of relatives from out-of-state) and so we thought it would be fun to give favours that were reminiscent not just of our wedding but of the Pacific Northwest... something they could take home as souviners of their trip out here. Just needed to figure out what. And it had to be CHEAP ;-).
I spent a lot of time on the internet searching for ideas but to no avail. And then I decided that the best place for inspiration would be to head down to one of the local landmarks - Seattle's Pike Place Market - and see what I could find down there!
Turned out to be a great idea. It was at Pike Place Market that I came across "Market Wear" by Gary & Sharon Goedecke. It was a little stall inside the market that sold canvas market bags with images of the famous Pike's Place Market sign. In addition to the large canvas bags, however, they also sold little tiny canvas versions of the bags - large enough to hold a single CD. I went down just before easter, so they had a whole selection of the little bags with Easter images on them - bunnies, coloured eggs, etc. They had little ones that had the Pike's Place Market sign on them too. I thought "What a great idea for favour bags! Just the right size to put on a plate". So I bought a couple of the little ones, and picked up a card with their names and phone numbers and headed home to show Tim.
He loved the idea! So we emailed Lynne with their contact info and asked her to find out if she could produce about 80-100 bags with an image of our choosing and our wedding date, and if so for how much and in what timeframe.
While Lynne was doing that research we had to decide 1) what image we wanted on the bags, and 2) what to put in them.
So... you guessed it... it was back to the Internet ;-). First to search for an image to put on the bags. That is where I came across www.lizaphoenix.com. It's a great web site! And while not everything on it appeals to my artistic taste, there are some absolutely beautiful images of the Seattle skyline, and other local landmarks. They'd be perfect! But we didn't want to violate the artist's copyright, so we sent mail to the contact listed for the artists, explained what we wanted to do, and asked permission to use one of the images for our favour bags. Worst case was that we'd get no response or they'd say "no". Our backup plan was to take our camera and go and take local pictures ourselves that we would reproduce, but we really liked this artwork. A couple of days later I received a response with permission to reproduce the images on our bags! How cool! So we sent a copy to the MarketWear folks and asked them to use the image provided.
They sent us a sample bag and we absolutely loved it! Now we just had to figure out what to put in them.
Again, on the Internet, I started poking around for more ideas. I thought some chocolate from the pacific northwest would be nice. That was how I came across The Northwest Candy Emporium online, and, more specifically, their "Personalized Wedding Mintz". They would reproduce any image you wanted onto these cute little gold-packaged white chocolates. And the image I wanted was the red calla lily from my invitation! I had a friend scan in a copy of our invitation, and a few minutes with some imaging software and I had it shrunk down to appropriate size. I sent it off to the folks at www.northwestcandy.com along with my order for 200 mintz - that would give me 2 mintz per person (plus a few for us to "taste test" ;-).
In my internet search for ideas, I had also come across www.plantamemory.com. They do personalized seed packet favours. I had originally started searching for places that did flower bulb favours - in particular, calla lily "bulbs" (I think technically they are actually tubers). I found a number of bulb places but none that did calla lilies specifically, but I really liked the idea of giving our guests something they could take home and plant so I went with the wildflower seed packets at www.plantamemory.com. So, once the bags were finished, we'd stuff each of them with 2 "mintz" and 1 seed packet. That seemed perfect. So I submitted an order for those as well.
The final result, after receiving the bags, the seeds, and the chocolate "mintz" and a couple of hours assembling them all, worked great! Below is a picture of the whole "package":
