A few years ago, I took a letterpress class at the San Francisco Center for the Book (lovely center, I recommend it to anyone in the SF Bay Area!) and that’s when I fully realized why letterpress costs the ka-ching! amount that it does. It took me nine hours on one Saturday to make one thank you card design, one envelope design with my address, and print over two hundred copies. And this wasn’t some complicated design, it had a bird and “Thank You” written on it. My eyes were basically cross-eyed by the time I got out of there, and my hands and clothes were totally filthy from playing with ink. Letterpress is labor intensive and crazy detail-oriented, and I bow down to all the masters of it!

So you can imagine my skepticism over this brand new product from QuicKutz. The examples are gorgeous, and the price is pretty decent at $150, but can something this small and affordable churn out the same quality as a Vandercook press? I don’t know myself, but I’d love to get my hands on one and play with it!

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Dessert. I LOVE dessert. I grew up in a sweets loving family, and to this day my sisters and Mom will scout out the best baked goods, ice cream, and candy. If it has sugar, we love it. Growing up, my Mom would bake chocolate chunk cookies, banana bread, peanut butter sandwich cookies, brownies, cheesecake, raspberry crumble bars…and for my going away party when I moved with the boy to San Diego, she baked my favorite: banana cream pie.

This might be why I am having such a hard time finding a bakery to supply goods for a dessert table. Something always managed to be wrong, because of course, no one can live up to my Mother’s baking. The service was bad, the cupcakes tasted like muffins, the tasting was $100, the cake melted after 20 minutes, the baker(s) never replied after two email convos (this is a tangent, but I’ve had maybe 10 vendors just never reply to me after the first initial chit-chat. Sure, our wedding isn’t going to be millions of dollars in some Italian villa, and I am not some fantabulous movie star willing to plunk down $10 for each chocolate chip cookie, but please, reply to my email! It’s courtesy! It also solidifies that I will never recommend you to anyone getting married in the future!)

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Does anyone ever really wear a bridesmaid dress again? {Crickets chirp}

I thought so. Please feel free to prove me wrong in the comments. :)

I hope that even if my sisters don’t wear their dresses again, that their photos don’t end up in a book like You Can Wear It Again by Meg Mateo Ilasco. (Despite how loud these dresses are, you really can’t deny that there’s something incredibly festive about them all! I think this book would make a great addition to a thank you gift for the maids.)

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Thank you to everyone for the time you took to make suggestions about where we should go on our honeymoon! There were many places I had not even thought of (Croatia, Buenos Aires) and I am glad I threw the question out there to get some feedback I would not have gotten otherwise. We still have not made much progress because we keep wanting different things, but we’ll get there eventually.

This weekend I picked up my dress, and now it’s sitting in my closet hanging off of our suitcases on the top shelf. And it will remain there for the next 6 months until I have my first alterations appointment! It’s a heavy white dress in a thin garment bag, and paranoid little me worries that something will happen to it over half a year. Like the cat will find it one day and decide to yank it off the rack. Or I will trip while holding it, ripping off some of the tulle or lace. Or aliens will come and decide they need an artifact from Earth and will decide that my wedding dress is too pretty to pass up. Totally possible.

A lot of alterations have to be done, including bringing up the shoulders so that I don’t *cough* expose myself in front of 200 people. The associate showed me a photo of a bride who had ties sewn in the back so the dress would stay up, but I immediately cried “Noooo! The back is the best part!”

[Buying a new gown from a bridal salon? They aren't joking when they say order 6 months in advance--it took 5 months for my dress to arrive in the store.]

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This recent New York Times article, 100 Hotels Under $150 by Stuart Emmrich, reminded me that we have yet to decide on what to do about a honeymoon.

[Side note: You should check out the New York Times piece if you're going to Europe on a budget. It lists hotels under $150 in a variety of cities, including London, Florence, Edinburgh, Lisbon, Rome and many others. A great resource for travelers!]

We both love to travel, explore new places, experience new cultures, and eat a lot of food that is foreign to us (but really yummy.)  We have been to Europe (London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Amsterdam, Rotterdam,) and Asia (Bangkok and Hong Kong) which leaves a lot of places to be visited! We’re basically treating our honeymoon as an excuse to visit someplace we have never been to before.

There are a couple of issues halting my research (and I LOVE to research, especially when it comes to places I have yet to visit.) One of the issues we are having is when to have this fantabulous vacation. With me having to work and go to school, and him having to…well, work and go to school, you can imagine that time is a bit difficult to coordinate.

[Our vacation to Paris a few years ago]

The second problem is that we’ll be having a Chinese banquet a week after our San Diego wedding, so that rules out skipping town for any extended period of time.

That means that we are most likely waiting to have this trip, I just don’t know until when and I don’t know how with our schedules, but we’ll be waiting.

I’m honestly a little scared that time will pass and I’ll randomly remember 2 years later–oh yeah. We never took a honeymoon.

Two questions:

1. Are you planning to wait to take your big trip, and if so, how long are you waiting? Months? A year?

2. If you were in my shoes, knowing the places we have traveled to together, where would you go?

Sometimes when I’m roaming wedding blog land, I am amazed at what bridal bloggers can do in their spare time. How do they keep up with their wedding and have a full-time job? How did they make their own wedding dress and stay sane? What do you mean they baked their own wedding cake?? I am so impressed by all the talent out there, so much so that I often feel like bowing in front of the computer hailing “I’m not worthy!”

Well, y’know, not really but it makes for a funny and geeky visual. :)

Last week I started graduate school part-time. I have a pile of papers, two empty Starbucks cups and a bag of chips to prove it. In addition to my full-time job, some volunteering, wedding planning, and blogging, I’ll be reading theory and writing papers at night. As I embark on this new chapter in my life, I thought it’d be an appropriate post to throw out to the wedding community–how do you fit planning a wedding into your life? And if you’re already married, what would you have done early on in the planning to alleviate some of the stress in the final days before the big event?

[Blooms from the Heart, San Diego, California]

In the wide world of wedding blogging, I feel as though flowers get the rep for being the most disposable, the one part of the day that very easily dies and ends up in the trash bag along with the plastic forks and paper plates used for the cake. For this reason, we’re doing potted plants for centerpieces, with the hope that 1) people will bring them home, or 2) they can be donated. Since the first will unlikely happen since most people are from out of town, I am very excited that our florist, Paula Rae of Rae Florae, introduced me to Blooms from the Heart, a San Diego organization which repurposes your event flowers by bringing them to hospitals, homeless shelters, senior care facilities, and other organizations in which they can be enjoyed and not tossed. This is a 100% volunteer run program, and Paula describes it as a top-notch non-profit with a big heart. They even take pictures of your flowers being delivered so you can see your flowers being given to a new home.

Are you planning to donate your wedding flowers?

I still remember the day I learned about Facebook. It was sometime in 2004, and I was walking back to my apartment with my friend Matthew after history class. We were dodging the usual suspects on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, when he enlightened me.

“Hey, have you heard of Facebook?”

“Facebook? What is that, some way to check people out without them knowing?”

“Ummm…sort of…it’s like Friendster, except better.”

“Better than Friendster? How is it different?”

“Well, for instance, it lists your class schedule, and then it will show you all the people who are in the class with you.”

“Whoa. Are you serious? How do they know what classes you’re taking, do you list them on your profile?”

“No, they have your class schedule because it’s linked to your school email account. You use that email to sign up.”

“WHOA.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool, these guys at Harvard made it. Go sign up, IM me when you have your profile up and I’ll add you.”

So I did. Matthew became my first “friend”. And thus began my Facebook profile. These days, it seems like everyone is on Facebook. Old high school friends. People from work. Businesses. My relatives. I even set up a “Catbook” for my cat. It’s an easy way to get the word out…

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I know what you’re thinking. Wait a minute Mo, aren’t you having your wedding in a vineyard with Italian food? This blog post title says “big fat Chinese wedding”, what’s so Chinese about a vineyard and Italian food? Is your entire profile a sham?? Is your name even Mo??!

I can explain. Yours truly not only is having one wedding extravaganza, but TWO. That’s right, we’re having two celebrations, in two different cities, with two different guest lists, two different invitations, two different florists, two different outfits…I could keep going but you’re probably getting a headache.

It’s insane. I now refer to our events as wedding #1, what my parents refer to as “the western wedding”, and wedding #2—The Chinese Banquet. [If you're unfamiliar or want to know more about Chinese banquets, Chinese Weddings by the Knot has a pretty good run-down of what a wedding banquet entails, plus a lot of other Chinese traditions! Also, The Wedding Banquet, directed by Ang Lee, kept me laughing and is very educational. I love that movie, two enthusiastic thumbs up.]

The good news (or is it good?) is that the banquet is being totally planned by my mother and my future mother-in-law. 300 of our parents’ friends and relatives (and when I say relatives, I mean second, third, and fourth cousins), will be dining on roast pork, shark fin soup, and walnut shrimp. You read right. THREE HUNDRED. This banquet is making both our parents very, very happy, so I’ve tried to get over all the hoopla and am instead focusing on my only task: finding something to wear.

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To save money, we opted to do an electronic save the date. Most people in my life didn’t even think that was necessary, but with 80% of our guest list being from out of town, and a family history of disorganization and lack of planning skills, I totally ignored them. I also thought it’d be a good way to get the word out about our website, which has a lot of information about our event and San Diego.

I used MailChimp, which is FREE for up to 3,000 sends, easy to use, and lets you customize an email campaign with your own artwork. I made a banner with our laid back red/pink/green theme in mind:

I highly recommend MailChimp if you are considering an electronic save the date. It lets you create lists, import them from an excel file, and gives you impressive stats (pie charts and graphs anyone?) about how often your email was opened and by whom. If you’d like to read more about my experience with MailChimp, I’ve written probably more than you need to know on Pink Argyle. This was the final email campaign, sent to about 100 of our guests (sorry, I had to break it into two!):

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