Plan Your Wedding 101 – Part 2
1. Bride’s wedding outfit and groom’s tuxedo
The rule of thumb for getting wedding dress is at least 6 months ahead. And I think most of the girls would do the dress hunting right after the venue are done deal.
The dress usually takes around 4 months to arrive, and then you have to fit it couple times in case you need some sort of alteration. Again, see if you can bargain your way to include the alteration!
And how to pick a good dress? As long as the material is light and not heavy. My wedding dress was made of Taffeta, it’s light for me to wear it for the full day.
For guy’s tuxedo, it’s usually one month ahead. Some groom I know just use regular black suits. So just pick whatever works.
related post:
- My wedding dress hunting.
- I got my wedding shoes from Ebay!
- Alex’s custom-made tuxedo from Indochino.com.
- Alex complete his wedding outfit with Syd Silver Formal
2. Choosing a wedding photographer
Choosing a wedding photographer is like choosing an artist that will document your biggest day of your life. If you have a bit of budget in hand, find the best wedding photographer you can for your money. I had two photographers, Jon from Union Photo for my engagement photos. And Kevin Lam for my wedding photos. Both are different type of styles. I would say Jon from Union Photos are more sleek and fashionable, and Kevin is very documentary style. I love both of their works!
So while searching for photographer, make sure you find out the pricing first and find out what service are included in the price. Most of photographers pricing can come in between 2000 to 5000. It depends on what type of service they provide. There’s a website called “WeddingWire.com“, it has people’s real review for their vendors. Perhaps it will be a good starting point to search photographers online.
So while you are looking for a wedding photographer, keep those in mind:
- What pricing package that the photographer offer?
- The price for 6 hours coverage? 8 hours coverage? What’s the overtime costs?
- Does photographer comes with an assistant?
- Does pricing include prints? and any extra print credit if you decide to enlarge one of the photo later?
- Does photographer also provide videography?
Usually I look for my photographers online, and my number 1 criteria is their website and then their portfolio. If their websites are ugly or hard to navigate or difficult to read, I doubt the artistic level of the photographer especially they can’t even fix up their own website! Other than the website, of course their portfolio next. You can get a pretty good vibe after seeing range of photos. Of course your photos will be created on the fly, so there’s nothing 100% guarenteed. Yet, a good photographer will make sure everything will turn out nicely on your big day.
I actually found Jon from Union Photo through Facebook Ad. lol. When I get to his website, I was like “wow”. He has a beautiful website! And then I saw his portfolio, they are amazing! That’s why I have no hesitation to book him. Someone else actually booked him for my same wedding day. That’s why I only had him for our engagement photos only.
And for my wedding photographer, Kevin Lam. I actually found him through one of my work function. He had taken few of my work events. I love his photos. So I contacted him to see if he’s available for wedding photography. At the time when I interviewed him, he didn’t have alot of wedding portfolio. However, with his other documentary work, I believe he will be an awesome photographer at my wedding. So I booked him and the photo did come out beautifully!
Both Jon and Kevin are great, the pricing difference is that with Jon, you can only get the digital high res file after you have purchase the photo. With Kevin, he gave you 200 prints and all the High res photos on DVD. We didn’t take the actual 200 prints, we end up just turning it into one canvas print.
related post:
- Toronto Photo shoot locations
- Our engagement photo shoot
- Our Wedding Photos
- Photo Canvas gallery wrap
3. Wedding Color
Choosing the wedding color, it’s all come down to your personal taste. So pick “one” color as your main theme, and then choose another color to either compliment with it or use it as contrast color.
Most of the wedding banquet hall or venue always have white as their table cloth, napkins, chair cover..etc. Unless you want to spend extra money to change the “default” theme that the venue provided, your wedding color basically adds the accent to the whole place.
The color applies to your wedding dress, your bridesmaids’ dress, groom’s tie, bouquets, centrepieces, cake and decorations.
So for example, if you love “red”, you can get your bridesmaid all wearing red dress, they can hold bouquet with a color that will compliment red (eg. white,yellow,orange..etc). And because most of the wedding dresses are either ivory or white, you can use the color in your bouquet. And the same concept goes to having the centre piece with red flower, or a cake with red flowers around..etc.
Check out TheKnot’s My Real Wedding section, there’s a “color” drop down box you can choose to see what other people had done with the color for their wedding.
I personally love the color Brown and Orange, so I had Linda (my bridesmaid) to wear a brown color dress, and we both have an yellow/orange colored bouquet. Choosing a color is never difficult, it only look scary when you try to put all different kind of color everywhere. The key is “consistency”, so just pick one, and then work your way from there.
There this site called Colorlovers.com it has colors, patterns..etc. You can look for color palette there as a start.
4. Wedding Flowers
After you have chosen your color theme for your wedding, you can then start working on your color of your flowers. Fresh flowers or artificial flowers, it doesn’t matter, as long as they are consistent for what you are trying to present for your wedding.
The best bang of the buck for the bouquets are in-season flower and local grown flowers. For ontario, there’s a site called OntarioFlowers.com, check out their flower library section , and there are also post online that you can find flower by season.
There are also some people decided to go for artificial flowers, There’s a company in Missauaga called Flora Seda International. They don’t have catalog online but it might worth to give them a call.
Related links:
- List of flower items that you should get for the wedding
- The quotes from the florists
- My wedding flowers!
5. Wedding Decoration (Centrepieces, wedding favors..etc)
Sometimes you don’t need fancy centre pieces, you can be very creative with it. For example you can probably get a cheap vase from IKEA and fill it water, put some fake flower or real flower in the water, and float with some votive candles. Or better yet, just a plate of fruits. lol.
I went to my friend’s Chinese wedding banquet hall, she has a plate of orange as centre piece and lucky bamboo in shot glass as wedding favors!
Sometime have the centrepiece double duty might be a good idea too. You probably can use the reception centrepieces as decoration for the ceremony. And if you have a lot of bridesmaid, you can probably use their flowers as centrepiece slater 
Do a search on Flickr, you will see what people had done for their centrepiece.
And for wedding favors, it’s also up to your budget. You don’t need something really fancy, probably a small box of chocolate does its job. My wedding favors consist of a mini tea can and tea strainer I got from DealExtreme.com. I didn’t want to give out anything that people won’t keep or won’t use.
I actually did a fair of wedding favor research, but then I soon realize that most of them might consider as “junk” later. So I kept it simple and low in budget. And once you add ribbon to your favors, it brings up the value of the gift
Here’s few places that you can hunt for your decorations and favors:
- Kijiji Free Classified
- Craigslist Classified – first select your city, and then you can search absolutely anything from there. Yes, it includes wedding favors and decorations
- IKEA – IKEA has cheap and good looking vases! It might boost your creative juice once you visit the store. There’s even a IkeaHacker site that are dedicated for people who loves playing with IKEA stuff!
- DealExtreme.com – I got my tea strainer there
- Dollar Store and local craft store
Then again, the key for your decorations is to make sure they are all on the same color theme. Consistency will bring everything together, and it will look better on the photographs or videos as well!
I am going to write up another post for the rest of the planning details. I have no idea I have wrote so much just for these few points!
Stay tuned!
related post:
Tags: Toronto Wedding & Bridal Resources, toronto wedding blog, wedding decorations, wedding flowers, wedding photography, wedding resources
27.Feb.09 
wedding 
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