The White Rabbit

I can't quite believe that we're...less than 2 weeks away? Yikes!

Bath Buddy Kid Favours & Programs

This is a strange looking picture of our army of bears. When it comes to favours, I am immensely practical and opted for something that was edible, that could be enjoyed the next day and would after that, no longer take up space (as someone who puts a high premium on storage!).


After throwing out my initial ideas of a clear acetyne tube of 3 macarons, or hiring a bake shop that had been willing to resurrect "Granma Liew's Famouse Almond Bisuits" (an old family recipe), we had decided to have Auntie Doreen make us fruit cake for our favours. She makes awesome fruit cakes in an absolutely old-school way that starts with making the cakes with great fresh winter ingredients, then dousing them every other day with her best brandy.


We figured what with Christmas two weeks around the corner, it would be a good way to tie in the theme with the festivities without being overly seasonal. We designed a box that would match the colour scheme (and the custom coasters) and I incorporated the monogram (a W in lace and an I in denim) and vintage fonts and added a Thank You message to guests on the back of the box.


On the kids favours though, we did want to do something fun and cute- so we got these bath bears, which are refillable with a small piece of soap, baby wash or powder soap. You can make these very inexpensively out of terry cloth the same way you make a sock bear puppet, or you can purchase them online. Ours cost us only $1 each I think, on average.


My dear friend D. procured me a plastic bag sealer ($7 online) after I spent weeks with the request as my Facebook status and I sealed the bears into plastic bags, then printed the tags and sliced them. I was originally going to thread a thick grosgean ribbon through it to match the adult favours but decided to staple the ribbon bow on in the end, since it'll help keep the tag and bag together.


We've sliced through 130 programs so far, really simple, long rectangles with the monogram, wedding party and menu and here they are with the other things that came back from the printers- table numbers and favour tags. The programs were also designed by V. from Custom Printables Online, she has a great service, one of designing monograms and also designing other paper goods- you pay $10 for the design charge and get three drafts which you can then take to a local printers. I found this to be a fraction of the cost of an all-in graphic designer who would then charge multiples of what I paid to manage the whole process for you. I think though, if you have an idea of what you want, this gives an element of DIY to the process and really helps you to spend where you've allocated budget

Rice Packets & Building a Flower Wreath from Ikea

I had seen an adorable picture of birdseed packets online (E.Snow/Mint Design)and written to the creator to ask for the format. She was kind enough to help us out and this is the result. I thought rice would be more hygenic, especially in our humid, tropical climate, then birdseed and although I was going to originally, follow her yellow-thread sewn glassine packet design, in the end, the thought of having to sew hundreds of these gave me pause.


I decided to print stickers instead. Strangely enough, I thought I would need to take the to a professional printer but running them through a regular printer with sticker paper gave great quality and colour. I cut them up and we sealed the rice (with some cut yellow paper string pieces) into thin self-sticking plastic bags. I chose a long, rectangular shape because I quite liked the assymetry of the clear plastic. If I were to do this over again, I would find some way to include the guest name and table number on these packets and have them perform a dual all-in-hand function. I'm not entirely sure they will be used by guests (or how many will get used) but the sealing packets were sold in bulk stacks of 100 for $2, the rice and paper string were super inexpensive and printing was as well, so I don't feel too bad about these pretty extras!


The White Rabbit has great vintage white wood double doors, as well as a modern set of glass double doors behind it. I wanted to have a couple of baby's breath wreaths hanging on them but to be honest, was not particularly willing to have a florist make them on the day of and to have them only see an hour's glory. I could have made them myself but then, it would have to be someone else's wedding! Part of me also felt like perhaps more flowers were unnecessary (the vintage double doors really are part of the restored church's architecture and don't have any nails or hooks, so you would have to weigh the wreath by a ribbon attached to a heavy stone flung over the door- a bit complex) so the compromise I came to was I would do the wreaths only if it wasn't going to cost too much time and effort.


I stumbled upon a flower sale at Ikea and picked up these wreaths for $2.50 each and 3 stems of hydrageas and gardenias for $1 each. These wreaths looked nothing like this initially, they were a sad, thin circlet of apple blossoms and vines. It's amazing what is possible with florist wire. We pulled off the bunches of flower petals (if you look closely, the wreath has apple blossoms, hydrangea and gardenias in varying shades of white and ivory) and wired them to the wreath. Then, I super-glued specific bulbs and petals on and will add brown lotus pods and fresh red Christmas berries the day before. That will probably be the most expensive part of the wreath, actually.


This is the money box, or Ang Pow box, the term for a traditional red packet of money that is given as a gift in most Asian weddings. The ones given to us as part of our package were pretty ugly, so I ripped off the copper metal flowers (!? I know..), pearl beads and diamentes and started creating a pattern from paillaites of lace, gauze that I cut out from wedding dress scraps.

Flower girl

How sweet is this photo? This is the chiffon dress, you can see in the second photo how it pools in ruffles and the shoulder straps are where I sewed on the ruffles of lace from my own dress.

Without the lace on the straps, the dresses look like all-white chiffon versions of the simple beach dresses from the previous post, although minus the white edging and with a cross-strap back instead. I didn't realize but both the girls look incredibly angelic.

Both flower girls (no boys, turned out to be too hard to procure one and I rather like having two girls anyway, they'll be good company for each other) are daughters of old friends, whom I've known way before they were pregnant/married. One of the most touching things is how excited and enthusiastic both sets of parents have been.

Erica and her mom have been so great about getting the dress sized for Ari, both dresses were a bit too wide and long for the girls (they only made them in size 6 and up but both girls are 4), so they are being taken in at the arms, the back and shortened to their knee length.

I love her surprised look in this picture. They moved recently from Hong Kong to Shanghai, so Erica is trying to jog Ari's memory by showing the picture of us (Ari, Erica and I) by the pool, on the computer. She also snapped a hilarious sequence of pictures where she is trying to ask Ari to practice smiling "with teeth".

The Preamble to A Processional

When I thought about a processional, the only thing I felt strongly about was that I would want both parents to escort me down the ailse. I thought it was a fantastic gesture of support for the equality in the modern relationship and certainly the parenting relationship. Then I realized that I did not want to pick between my cousins nor friends for bridesmaids, nor did I like the term 'maids'. So I thought perhaps I would only have two children, although it was probably this picture that triggered it all for me. This was back in a day when I wanted a seafoam and chilli red wedding. Seafoam is probably the colour between the jadeite green and the blue you see here, it's sort of a restoration hardware blue.


I imagined barefeet children with their hair swept under vintage flowered handbands. I wanted casual, offbeat flower girl dresses that made them look like children on the beach, not sweaty satin cummerband ones that would make them look like christmas card children. Rather than a macronage crochet, I though I would make the little capelets out of a clear white lace from my own wedding dress.


In fact, the lady whose wedding this was, actually has a children's wear line. I really liked the simple white band edging and the gathers, though the design for the girl's dresses was simple enough that I thought I would just get it tailored in Singapore.


As it turned out, that's not quite the way the story went. One day, while puttering around in Raffles City, I walked into one of my favourite kid's stores for natural, breezy but tailored children's clothing. I saw a rather similar dress, a simple white chiffon layered dress that I would have loved to wear myself. I thought I would top it with capelets but at the end of the day, that just seemed too much material, so I gathered up the scrap lace from my wedding dress alteration and sewed on shoulder strap ruffles so their dresses would more match mine.


In the end, the question of bridesmaids was also settled for me. When the summer JCrew catalogue came out, three of my close friends independantly chose and bought the same dress. The odds of this happening, for girls who have never really liked the same clothes, boys or activities, is slim to none and I guess we immediately decided they couldn't be worn in the same place, except in a processional. Luckily, my cousin who is my maid-of-honour/coodinator's had chosen a blue dress too and my mom a blue-and-white ming vase cheongsum.

Photography

I tried to think today of "useful photographic information", what does that mean? The good news is, I've put together a shotlist. I also think I have a fairly predictable sense of style. I like to read and write, I like photos that are contemplative. I took photography when I was a freshman and spent more time smelling darkroom chemicals then studying that term. Shaped by that experience, I still love, more than any other kind of photography, silver gelatin close-up portraits that show every lash. I don't like group photographs or lots of legs in photographs. I love crisp images, lines, eyes, little kids. I love bright reds, muted yellow, seafoam teal (the restoration hardware blue) and most shades of grey. I'm fairly modern, I don't like the 80s and I love clean textures like glass, light shades of woodgrain and white, khaki, dark navy cable-knit.

I found two photos, the one that started it all- the original photo was more close-up on her smile and the friend's hand rested on her hair and you can't see but underneath the lace skirt she had killer dark cobalt blue Louboutin pumps, and this new one that made me smile yesterday.

The White Rabbit

Tell me what it is about the White Rabbit and pink? I was looking for pictures of the place online and stumbled upon some wedding photos taken there, in both cases, the brides had some variant of hot pink. I love the cheongsum and I don't really like the pink dress but I do love the place...

A dog for Jamesie

Look, such a cute wedding dog. These last few days, Z. has been again overtaken by the desire to find a bulldog puppy (it has been variations of this, a cliquai, which is a miniature husky, a Shiba Inu, which is some sort of Japanese dog). It certainly runs stronger than the desire to do anything to further the wedding! He keeps saying that he doesn't want our kids to grow up afraid and allergic to dogs. A dog for Jamesie, he says hopefully, every other day, although somehow I have no doubt who the dog would be for.

I think this is his way of coping with wedding stress. It seems like everytime we need to use a plastic bag sealer or we talk about "the parental guestlist", he tells me about his having uncovered a fraud breeder or a new litter in some far-flung place that we can go to play with puppies.

This is the same man, by the way, who, growing tired of girl's names and boy's names, to say nothing of middle names, announced to me one day that he was going to name all the kids, henceforth, after himself. So, he continued, thinking aloud, they'll be Ziggy, Twiggy and Miggy.

My future family will have the world's stupidest Christmas card. It will say, love from Iggy, Ziggy, Twiggy and Miggy. (One of my best friends from the US wrote to say, if their names were Zachary, Tyler and Michaela, it would not be such bad nicknames- ah, good heart)

Z's response was to say reproachfully that if I felt left out, they could call me Wiggy!

More new pictures...

With a lot of hard work by Z (and the movers), we have some furniture in the flat!The cushions are white because I forgot to bring over the matching cushion covers I had made in Beijing.


It's most of the furniture that we will have, given the space is really small! This is the table that we got at Ikea, we found it in the As Is section for $100. It's a little too large for the small dining space but it was a nice colour and height.


I think the angle probably gives some idea as to how small this space is. There's basically enough room in the bedroom for a admittedly king-sized bed, a wardrobe, a dresser and not much else! A decal, I guess. I got it on Etsy! One of my first purchases.


The wardrobe was another source of Ikea drama. We had bought a taller cupboard, thinking that it would fit. However, there is a beam across part of the wall and what wound up happening is that the wardrobe didn't clear the beam as we had thought(by 3 cm!) So it kind of leant against the wall, in a totally unsatisfactory way. Guess what Ikea's returns policy is like- no returns of assembled goods, goods not in original packaging or installed goods. This wardrobe came with assemebly, you can't even buy it without buying the assembly service and paying the assembly charge. In fact, they even charge you a percentage assembly charge on the parts of the wardrobe (seperate charge for "assembly" of each wire basket, which just need to be slotted into its tracks)! So I called up and fussed about how it was ridiculous that this wardrobe was one day old and surely, they did not expect us to forfeit the whole cost of it. All we wanted was an exchange, we weren't asking for a refund. So on and so forth.


In the end, they let us pick out a new wardrobe and did an exchange for 80% of the value of the wardrobe (but they picked up the delivery and assembly charge). Although this new wardrobe immediately became thus more expensive, to be honest, I was just glad to have the old one out of the house and we were thrilled that this new one that we picked out, which we somehow didn't even see when we were last at Ikea, is much more to our taste, fits better and is wider with 3 sections instead of 2, which is absolutely wonderful.

New Pictures....

These were photos taken in the midst of work that was being done on the place. This first picture shows one side of the balcony, with a Lack Ikea shelf that I think I'll wind up returning.


This is the other side of the balcony.


This was the living room floor, shows where the wall was ripped up and how the workers had to repaint the floor. I came in and shrilled at them to paint the whole floor- they were just going to paint the part that the wall had come off (Chinese service!). I spared them painting the bedroom but now I wish I had not, the epoxy grey colour in the living room and bedroom is rather different!