1. Choosing Your Wedding DJ
There’s no doubt that you need music for your venue!! No matter it’s ceremony or reception.
Fortunately I have my ceremony is at Toronto’s City Hall. It provides the essential music with their CD player. ha ha.
And for my reception, I hired Brian from High Five Entertainment as my music DJ of the night.
We had an initial meeting with Brian before the wedding to find out his style and music taste. He provides us a sheet of music recommendation, a professional contract and a spec for his equipment. Around one month before the wedding, I researched the songs and picked the ones I liked and forward Brian the list of the songs.
I also asked Brian to be my MC for my reception as well. He did a good job and remained professional till the end of the night. (You don’t want to get someone who’s drunk half way through the night!)
So here are few pointers when finding a good DJ:
- Ask for several references
- Ask what type of music they would recommend for certain age of audience. (My guests are all around late 20s)
- Does the equipments (e.g. Speakers), are they suitable for the size for the venue? And is all the equipment digital based?
- Will DJ provide wireless microphone and any special lighting?
- Will DJ also act as MC if requested?
Usually the rule of thumb is you want to find someone who is legit and easy to work with. Because if they ruin the music, they pretty much ruin the night too!
related post:
2. Wedding Cakes
Our wedding cake!
Cutting wedding cake is one of the most important event for your wedding night. Wedding cake also acts as a centerpiece for headtable (or dessert table).
I did quite a few of research to find a cake artist that will make my cake happen. I am very specific on the design and the taste. I found Cindy from The Wedding Cake Shoppe to make my wedding cake.
There are few places that I looked up for wedding cakes. Except a lot of them are not available for my wedding date 
Cake Design
Not sure what you want your cake to look like? Well, again, either you get a white cake, or get a cake that the color that goes with your color theme.
Go to Flickr and type in “wedding cake” in the search box, it should show you what people have done for their cake.
When choosing the cakes, it’s better that you do a cake tasting first before you decide. And then show your cake artist the photos that you want your cake to be. You can customize it however you want. It’s your cake that you are paying for. My cake was mango flavour on the top tier and then mocha for the bottom tier.
I ordered 40 person cake because I am not having the cake as main dessert dish. (Our total guest count is 60 ppl) We have a dessert table after the dinner. Now I regret for what I did. I shoulda just make the cake as the dessert dish because no one can eat that much! There end up so much dessert leftover! argh.
My cake was 2 tier and for 40 ppl for $220. So look around and taste the cakes. And do this early because not all the cake artist are available for your wedding date!
3. Final Expense
Everything in wedding all comes down to money, just in case anyone is interested to see my final expense sheet. Please go to my fully disclosed wedding expense post here. Planning wedding is not that difficult, all you need is to take time to research and get the best bang of the buck. And if you have no time, then just hired a wedding planner. lol
related post:
Tags: Toronto Wedding & Bridal Resources, toronto wedding blog, wedding, wedding resources
24.Mar.09 
wedding 
Comments (4)
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:
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:
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:
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 Comments (3)
One couple of my friends are getting married sometimes in 2010. The couple is now starting their full force to work on their wedding. Yet, my friend still have no clue how to start planning one.
I am not a professional wedding planner, but I tried my best to plan one. So here’s how you can start…
1. Pick a date and time
I think this is the BASIC of all wedding, you need a date!! Friday, Saturday or Sunday, doesn’t matter, just pick one!
However, sometimes venue will give discount if it’s Friday. Old Mill gave us 15% discount for our total cost. So it was a sweet deal. Yet the problem is that if you want to have ceremony during the day, not everyone can make it because most of us are working!
And if you are concern about the weather how it might turn out, check out historical stats from the weather network. (I only link to Toronto’s historical stats, but you can always check out other cities). Usually the summer months in Toronto looks pretty good in terms of rain precipitation!
Another way is to pick a date that is easy to remember. Usually it’s not for the bride, it’s for the groom!
Once you set the date, stick with it. The rule of thumb is the larger guest number you gonna have, the earlier you should book the date! some people book their venue two years ahead!! It’s crazyness!
Lastly, you should try to schedule your reception right after your ceremony.
I have friends having ceremony in the morning and she has to wake up at 3am to prep everything!
My ceremony was at 2:30pm and I had to wake up at 8 am to prep everything, it’s very time consuming!
Therefore it’s best to have your ceremony sometimes in the afternoon, and then following the reception right away. It keeps the momentum and the guests won’t have to waste the whole day for your wedding.
2. Set your budget and do your possible headcount
There’s no question that money is number one issue for wedding planning. My original goal was to have a wedding 20K and less. I managed to meet that by trying to get the most out of my money.
I also prioritize the list of guests to come to our wedding. Don’t feel bad that you didn’t invite your neighbours or your coworkers. Setting priority of guests are more important to keep your budget in place.
(Some people will thank you not to invite them to pay for their meal!)
I personally invited around 80 people, and 60 people came to the wedding! The venue usually will quote for the possible headcount, and you will need to pay deposit to secure the date. If your guestlist turn out to the less than the quoted price, the venue will refund you money.
3. Pick a Venue – Part I
Picking Venue is not always easy, I personally searched 5 venues. It’s a lot of phone calls, emails, price comparison and time for sure. The first thing when you call a venue, they will always ask what’s your approx. guest count. So if you done your homework for point #2, then it’s easy job for ya. Always ask for a quote for the same number of guests, and get as much detail breakdown as possible.
And what’s your best bang for the buck venue? Restaurants or Hotels.
Mainly reason is because they have everything there! The kitchen, the tables, the cutlery, plates..etc. Some room that the restaurants or Hotels provided are probably decorated already. You will save some money towards your decoration.
The very first place that we looked at was an art gallery at Distillery District. The gallery is beautiful. I fell in love with it. However, after I saw the price breakdown, I backed up and went screaming! If you are hosting your reception where the place doesn’t provide the table, the chair, the kitchen, the server..etc. You will end up paying everything just to make this reception happen. Read my “reception insanity” blog here. Check out the Thompson Landry Art Gallery Post.
If you are as frugal as I am, don’t go that route. Try to find the best you can find without paying extra price tag for …everything!
Here are the questions that you can ask when searching for the venue:
For the Ceremony
- Find out the time slot that’s available for the day that you wish to have your wedding. If you are booking for Friday, then try to have the Ceremony later of the day, and then it follows the reception right after, so you won’t waste time.
- Find out where you will have your ceremony in the property? if it has a chapel? If it’s a chapel, what’s the chapel rental fee?
Can the ceremony hosted outdoor? It there any extra fee if hosted outdoor?
- Can you bring your marriage officiant? or you have to use the one provided by the venue?
If you have to use the one provided by the venue, how much would that cost?
- What’s the refund policy?
For the Reception
- Make sure you ask as detail as you can about the room, e.g. What’s the max capacity of the people in the room?
- Ask the venue if they provide cake table or head table.
- If the chair covers are included? (unless they have real nice looking chairs.)
- If table clothes, table numbers, votive candles, and receiving line table (for guest sign in ) are provided?
- If venue can provide a easel on the table or on the floor so that you can place your engagement photo for people to see, or poster(s) with guest lists.
- While you are in the reception room, also ask where the bar, DJ will be in the room. Other equipment is that you can ask if they provide projection video screen, microphone, or any speakers.
- Find out where is the possible table layouts. Some place I went have dance floor right in front of the head table, and the guests table goes around the dance floor. The Balmoral room in The Old Mill, it’s the same floor through out, so the coordinator at Old Mill helped out layout the tables so we can have a little dance floor area.
- Also, ask what is the time you can have your venue till. Ours was till 1am only. After 1am, there’s extra fee. So just make sure you ask those.
4. Pick a Venue – Part II
- Find out your basic food per person. The biggest price difference for each menu is mostly the food. Some venue will give you a list of packaged up menu that they have. Some venue will ask you to pick the food. Whichever is fine, but do your math. We picked our food from the set package except we didn’t go with the open bar. So the food itself is $62 CAD per person. And we’ll host all the drinks that were consumed that night.So far most of the meal price I’ve seen, the basic cost is around 55 to 65 CAD dollar per person. (not including alcohol and extras). So you can probably do your math from those numbers first to set your budget.
- Open Bar, Host Bar or Cash Bar? The reason that we didn’t pick open bar is because most of my friends are non-alcohol drinkers. However, we still want our families and friends to have fun on us, so we decided to go for host bar. And if you are limited with your budget, cash bar might be a better idea. And watch out for the open bar, you might be limited with certain brands of liquor. There’s also time limitation for open bar as well. So ask your Venue if they limit certain type of liquor if it’s open bar and how long you can have your open bar!
- Dessert or No Dessert? I personally think having your wedding cake as your dessert is far more than enough. (especially for small wedding like mine!) I had tons of dessert at my wedding except everyone is too tired to stay later to have those!!! Unless you know people will be staying later and dance whole night. Having a bit of dessert is a good idea.
- Menu Tasting. With Old Mill, they have menu tasting for your menu would be at your wedding. I think it’s a good idea to always try out your food before your set foot on the menu. The only thing is that, they charge full price for the food. So if it’s 62 dollar per person at my wedding, it’s 62 dollar for the menu tasting. Some place might offer complimentary menu tasting (e.g. Fairmount Royal York). Yet Fairmount is double the price for the actual wedding meal compare to The Old Mill! Argh.
5. Pick your wedding party
For me, it’s quite simple, I have a small wedding, so I only have one maid of honor, and Alex has one best man. But I think the ratio is 1 to every 50 guests. If you are not sure how many bridesmaid you should have, if you have 200 guests, then 1 maid of honor and 3 bridesmaids are all you need.
I personally paid the dress for my maid of honor (Linda) because I would feel bad to dedicate works to Linda and then she has to pay for her own dress! However, it seems like it’s normal for people here to ask bridesmaid to pay for their own dress. (*sigh*)
In conclusion, keep your wedding party simple! The best man usually will help out the groom to pick out outfits, the wedding ring, or become the chauffeur for the big day. The maid of honor or bridesmaid usually help you out planning the wedding. They are also the best people you can rely on coordinating the event as well.
6. Now, start the wedding details!
I guess I will write out the rest of the details on my second post. But here’s what I will have:
- Wedding Dress/Groom outfit
- Wedding Photographer
- Wedding Flowers
- Wedding DJ
- Wedding favors
- Wedding cake
Stay tuned!
related post:
Tags: Toronto Wedding & Bridal Resources, toronto wedding blog, wedding, wedding resources
24.Feb.09 wedding Comments (0)
Getting married? Due to the economy melt down, everyone is keeping their cash in their pocket.
However, have you noticed that there are tons of bargain these days?
January is a good month to look for your bridal gown (unless you already have your gown).
Take a look of several events for bridal shows happening in Toronto
Canada Bridal Show
http://www.canadasbridalshow.com/
metro convention centre, Jan 9, 10,11
Saving Tip: 2 for 1 ticket!
Ritche Bridal Super Sale
http://ritchebridal.com/
Montecassino Hotel, 3710 Chesswood Drive, Jan 15-Jan18,2009
Total Wedding Show
http://www.totalweddingshow.com/
International Centre, Jan 16-18, 2009
Wear White 4 Windfall Bridal Blow Out Sale
toronto.com’s event listing
WW4W’s website
Windfall,29 Connell Court, Unit #3, Toronto, ON, M8Z 5T7, 416-703-8435
Jan 24, 2009
Phone National Bridal Show
http://www.nationalbridalshow.com/spring
Direct Energy Centre, Exhibition Place, Toronto. Jan 23-25
Saving Tips: They are giving out free ticket for bride to be. Click here to register.
Canada’s Wedding Expo
http://www.canadasweddingexpo.ca/
Feb 21-22,2009
Toronto Congress Centre North
650 Dixon Road,Toronto, Ontario, M9W 1J1. Tel: (416) 245-5000
I personally didnt’ go to those shows because I got engaged in March and got married in August. So I think I miss out couple big savings as well. However, if you are buying gowns, don’t forget to bargain.
How to bargain for cheaper brial gowns?
1.” No GST & PST – I’ll pay you cash!”
2. “No taxes & include alteration – I’ll pay you cash RIGHT NOW!”
3. And if they insist you to pay taxes, then you ask for some sort of free alteration or free accessory rentals.
You just have to bring your guts to the store or the booth to bargain it out. So it’s best to have your bridal party with ya. Peer pressure always works!
Right now it’s also a good time to buy your wedding decor and favours. Just because everything is in deep discount. So use your money and spend it wisely.
If you use visa or mastercard for most of your payments, make sure it collect some kind of points or pay you back with some dividends. Here’s a good read from Million Dollar Journey for using credit cards. It even compare top free cash dividend cards and top free reward cards.
I personally own 3 credit cards. Our house common expense goes onto our CIBC dividend card which gives back 1 % of spending that you did through out the year. My personal expense goes to my Scotia SCENE visa card which gives me free movies. And if we need to rent a car from time to time, I’ll use my TD bank’s gold select card for the free rental car insurance. Those are all free visa card with no annual fee. And I paid off my balance every single month.
However, it’s bargain time doesn’t mean you should blow all your money. Do your budgeting and homework before you take out that hard-earned cash.
Tags: gown, Toronto Wedding & Bridal Resources, toronto wedding blog, wedding, wedding resources
08.Jan.09 wedding Comments (2)
Our wedding photo package actually includes 200 4″x6″ prints. We decided not to go with those prints. The reason being that
1) I have to look for a photo album to hold them
2) I don’t have space to store them – we live in a newly built condo that storage doesn’t exist
3) They will get tucked away in our bookshelf!
So we asked Kevin to exchange the prints for a canvas gallery wraps 16″x24″. It’s basically photo print on canvas style and wraps on the canvas frame. It will be a nice addition to our new home.
You can see more detailed product shots from Kevin’s blog
Our canvas gallery wraps
Photo wraps around the canvas
Tags: photo, Toronto Wedding & Bridal Resources, toronto wedding blog, wedding photography
23.Oct.08 wedding Comment (1)
Few weeks ago, I decided to make my own wedding album with mypublisher.com. I didn’t go with my photographer’s options using their wedding book album. It’s not like I don’t like it, it’s because it’s really out of my budget! (each wedding book cost over $500!)
Mypublisher’s page paper are thin, they are not heavy duty cardboard page like the wedding book, but I think it’s good enough for me. Plus if you can find the promotional code online, you can “buy one and get one free”. So I can keep one and send my parents one
I used two different photographer for my engagement photos and wedding, so I decided to put both of their pictures together into one album.
Mypublisher provides this “mypublisher” software that you can customize your book from the front to the back. The do have page template setup so you can insert up to 12 images per page. However, I’ve seen some people just make their own page layout in photoshop and the save it as one big image to insert onto the page. I didn’t bother to make my own layout, so I just use their template and put all the photos together.
The standard is usually 20 pages, but I added another 14 pages, and each additional page is $.99, plus I added the book jacket for extra $4.95. If you also want to try Mypublisher, I would actually suggest you to go for leather cover or just classic cover and NO JACKET. I thought they would print the cover photo on the actual book cover again but they only print on the book jacket. And the book jacket thickness is very flimsy.
See mypublisher pricing here
The total after shipping is $70.59 US, and then when it gets to Canada, you will have to pay $13 for custom tax. So I think it turns to cost around $40 per book.
You can view my photobook online as well
if you cannot see the link, go to Mypublisher’s Mybookshelf
and type in my order id: M801708
and enter the password: 1284869
Enjoy!
Front cover
inside page sample
inside page sample
inside page sample
inside page sample
album back cover
Tags: mypublisher, photos, Toronto Wedding & Bridal Resources, toronto wedding blog, wedding album, wedding resources
22.Oct.08 wedding Comments (0)
