Kids Table

We'd put out some markers, crayons, cups, paper, stickers and toys for our very important little guests, in a little alcove near the garden. Nothing beats an Iphone though!

The Little Dancer

Dear En, one day you will look back on these photographs of yourself, maybe right before you get married, when you will no longer be a cute little flower girl but center-of-attention bride.



In between then, you might look at these photographs and cringe, wondering why mummy and her friends kept these pictures of you. You might be passing through that valley of time where these pictures, in which you and Ari were both shorter than the candlesticks at the doorway, will no longer look very cool to you.





When you think that though, remember that you charmed strangers with your animated expressions and pure joy. Looking at you twirling and dancing makes me very happy to have found a flower girl dress that was both layered with pleats of chiffon, lace and satin, yet light and streamline. I thought I was the happiest, having spotted such a dress on a random shopping day but looking at the photos and hearing your mummy and Ari's mummy describe the reactions to me, I realize my excitement can't really be as good as a four-year old's.





May you always stay happy, En, joyful and cheerful, curious and confident, poised and helpful. May you have many, many years with the ones who love you and with those whom you will come to love. Thank you for being such a sweetheart of a flower girl.


En with Uncle Joel


En with Papa


With much love, Auntie Weylin

Seating place cards

I had saved recycled cardstock for the seating cards and had just finished neatly writing names on thin strips of card when I realized that there was no way the servers would be able to tell who was having fish and who was having beef. So it was back to the drawing board. I looked it up online and some vendors suggest having a colour code, which is easier for busy waitstaff. I decided to use red borders and a picture of a cow for the beef, blue and a picture of a salmon for the fish and green and a picture of a turnip for the vegetarians. I found these cute print icons online.


I'll post the photo details of the food when the photographers send it but these are the seat cards in real life, tucked under the white ribbon of the favour boxes and these were the dishes themselves, which my dear friend R. sent to me.

Rehearsal

These are the two flower girls, En and Ari, at the rehearsal. We were breaking the cardinal rule and working with kids, babies but thankfully no pets. Erica told me that Ari was so excited, she wanted to wear the white dress for the rehearsal too, pretty much as soon as she got off the plane but Erica didn't think it was a good idea (neither was she allowed to wear the shoes). Rachel brought all three kids to rehearsal, which was hard for her because apparently Min, En's little sister was wailing because she wasn't a flower girl! I hadn't realized it but both girls are even the same height.


We thought it would be fitting for the girls who had their kids, to carry their babies, instead of bouquets (though we later gave them smaller but identical bouquets). This is them all lined up outside the White Rabbit.


Kate has grown really big, this is Denise hefting her up with two arms!


The girls were a hoot. First they wouldn't go in, though generally when the doors opened and perhaps because there were other people standing in line behind them, they obediantly walked forward. Then they went but trickled rather than threw flowers. Then as one threw flowers, the other would squat and pick up the flowers, dashing in front of the bridesmaids behind to gather flowers from the floor (and with the mothers grabbing their hands to pull them out of the way).


Off they go!

Cake photos, two days after

Brides are right about one thing, it is kind of a blur.

I would add another piece of advice and that is, pop a couple of Panadols in the morning of your big day- it Really helps and a little painkiller never hurt anyone. I'm due back in the office today but after the last couple days where I've had a fever (then had it break in a cold, cold sweat), the runs, a headache and a backache, I now have something incurable by more sleep. I have two feet full of blisters. I have, among others, a blister on my small toe on the left foot and a blister on my right foot, in between two toes. Now that the painkiller has worn off, it's so painful, I'm the hobbling-after-bride.

Luckily though, I had some friends take pictures, so I can see how things actually looked before the official photographers send their photos to me. This is the cake that E. baked, she wrote really eloquently on her site about how she and hubby-to-be drove madly to the White Rabbit with the aircon on full blast, praying that the buttercream would hold up. It held up beautifully!

I was especially impressed by how she fashioned the cake topper from the leftover flowers that we had from the bouquets, she made it look just like the picture inspiration! I cannot count the number of people who told me how amazing the cake was and how they wanted another slice, even days later, so the adventure wth buttercream was definitely worth it. There were slices upon slices of cake and guess what, I didn't get one. This proves you can have your cake but you can't eat it too...

417 boxes of cake

The cakes have arrived from Ipoh and they look and smell, just wonderful. My whole dining room is perfumed by the smell of alcohol and fruit cake and they lend this beautiful warm smell to the rest of the house.

In some ways, I think these pictures are a good representation of me and what my life is. I sort of stand back and my mom reminds me that they were impractical. Which they kind of were....but they are good value, they are incredible quality and most importantly, they are a nice gift for guests. I will admit, guiltily, then when I look at them, I feel a sense of richness, the exact sense of richness that I feel when I have overbought at a supermarket (and know it).

These cakes were made in Ipoh by Auntie Doreen, who had made this great fruitcake for my cousin's wedding some years ago. I remembered how good it was and thought perhaps if I got married, that I'd like to give something similarly substantial to guests. Of course, that was many college years ago and marriage wasn't really a serious prospect. Then when the time finally came, in respect of the fact that the cakes were well, in Ipoh, I started making alternative plans.

One plan was to have a trio of macarons wrapped into an acelyne clear plastic tube and ribboned. The second plan was to resurrect my grandmother's almond biscuit recipe, my favourite one that she would make me a tin of every year at Chinese New Year. I found a cake shop in Ang Mo Kio, Pinegarden Cakes, who were willing to take the recipe and make guest favours out of it. I thought we could gift these in similar boxes lettered "Grandma Liew's Famous Almond Bisuits", yes, the spelling mistakes are deliberate. How cute would that be.. I don't think I've ever seen that done in an Asian wedding.

At the end of the day, given some hiccups like the macarons being the same price as the much more substantial cake and the bakery taking too long to come up with a proper quotation (they had to wait for the kitchen to be free to run a trial of the biscuits), Zhan decided he and our parents would like the cake better and it would be a good way to tie into the festive season without seeming too Christmassy. Getting Auntie Doreen to agree was a fairly simple matter.

The rest was decidedly less so. I made several mock-ups of the box, the colour, the fonts and the size, from Canele biscuit boxes. Then, I shopped around for a printer who would make it for us for cheap, which is surprisingly hard to find. Art Paper Co, a promisingly huge printing warehouse, located in Jalan Besar and for which I tracked out to an industrial park during my lunch hours, was disappointingly expensive, with their rationale that with large-scale printers, there was a lot of large-scale wastage and so given our small print batch, it just wasn't cost-efficient. On my way out though, I spied a Le Crueset pan and discovered the boss lady's family imported these into Singapore and so all my print-discovery expedition turned out into was a purchase of some fairly good but irrelevant deals on Le Crueset dutch ovens!

The printer number 2 was right in Tanjong Pagar Plaza but they were a tad more expensive then my original printer find, that came recommended through a wedding photographer friend. I had met the representative first but because he hadn't seemed keen, I'd struck him off, only to have him return weeks later with the lowest quote! He was even really efficient about it, getting his designers to work on my paltry design and shape it to my needs. Later on, I asked him to design the tags for the kid favours and again, he did so obligingly and didn't even charge me for it (it turned out that they were really expensive to print in a tiny batch, so he sent me a commercial-printer friendly version, again for free).

The boxes were printed thus ages ago and sent up to Ipoh, along with thick white grojean ribbon I had purchased at Kin Soon at Arab Street. I've since found out that they are the biggest ribbon dealer in Asia Pacific, who knew?

Months went by, with periodic updates from Auntie Doreen, saying I've baked the cakes today....I'm pouring alcohol into them every other day for this whole month...they are smelling just wonderful. Finally, the time came to collect them and my fairy godmother stepped in to offer her driver to send them to our doorstep in Singapore. Her daughter S., offered to house them until she was to bring them to the White Rabbit. I don't know what we would have done without them.

Then halfway through, my mom got worried and wondered about customs. So we had a driver drive up to JB and meet the first driver from Ipoh in JB, then he cleared customs (because he was from a freight forwarding company) and drove them here, even stopping along the way to bring back a gift for godma.

Auntie Doreen had run out of ribbons, so I purchased a new reel and today, J. came over and helped ribbon half the remaining boxes. Then M. came over for dinner and ribboned the other half of the boxes. Tomorrow, I am baking with D. who has offered me her kitchen and her help in making salted caramel macarons and banana chocolate cupcakes for the dessert table at The White Rabbit. I have visions but if it were not for amazing friends who are willing to devote their time and love to making them a reality, they would not be true. I think when I look back, it will be these times that I remember most, stirring, sitting on the floor tying ribbons, chatting, gossiping, laughing.

More Details

The funny thing is, a week away, who knows how you do feel? I feel, more than ever, that this is a labour of love. I feel more than ever, that I'm shouldering the weight of the Inquisition. (Excepting, my wonderful coordinators, who have done nothing but continually remove stress from my shoulders and rub them lovingly). I'm not sure I've ever wasted more time with dumb things.

I've had people piss me off to no end and I'm sure, done the same to other people. In other words, planning is not really as pretty as the vision. And sometimes after all your planning, people come back to your vision and say, oh, it's really nice. That incredibly pisses me off. I mean, what did you expect, friend?

So I guess the funny thing about planning, is that in the process, you realize who knows you really well and who really does not. In part because as the day approaches, I find my patience wearing thin so easily and exacerbated by the fact that you wind up having to assign people tasks within their capabilities or risk doing everything over.

That being said, who really cares eh? At the end of the day, as long as you have a good husband, someone who is unchangably reliable, well-meaning and loyal, I suppose the rest is, really, just for show.

But just because I really am all about the details, here are a couple of pictures, taken in incredibly bad lighting. Thank God Vicki and Tom will do a much better job over the next week. My mom picked up the flower girl dress (yay, Mom) and I scooted down to get a couple shots of the table numbers, the favours, the table layout, so that I could give it to my long-suffering coordinators.