Tammy and Phat's Wedding Blog

On this day I finally sent in our choices for our photo album to our photographer. Almost took us a year lol! Yay can’t wait to see our wedding album. We were only able to choose 60 pictures..it was sooo hard. There were so many pictures I wanted in the album but they couldn’t make the cut. We decided we are also going to make our own albums..probably on snapfish or Costco. Still can’t believe our wedding was almost a year ago. I guess time flies when you are having fun.

I am so inspired to keep blogging when I get messages from people telling me that my blog helps them and that they enjoy reading my blog! Sometimes I feel like nobody is reading this but I blog for myself as memories anyways..sort of like a wedding diary..but now I know people read it!

Anyways, I wanted to blog about my wedding dress. When I was shopping for wedding dresses I went to a LOT of places.  I wanted to make sure I got to see a lot of options before I ultimately chose my wedding dress. Plus, you know, I plan to only do this once so might as well take advantage and have fun trying on wedding dresses! So here are the places I checked out:

David’s Bridal. Of course I had to check it out! I made an appointment at the South Coast David’s Bridal but unfortunately, didn’t find anything I fell in love with.

Mon Ami Bridal Salon in Costa Mesa was another place I went to. Okay, this place is WAY over my budget, but I just went for the experience. lol. I went with my sister/Maid of honor Suzanne. I would highly recommend any bride to make an appointment here just for the experience and to be able to try on gorgeous designer dresses. Fun! You even get your own room where your entourage can sit in too! Of course I fell in love with many dresses there, but I was strong! I knew I just couldn’t spend that much!

Bella Wedding Bridal in LA they got really good reviews on Yelp so when Phat and I were in LA to see our photographer I wanted to check them out.

I was open to renting a dress so I checked out the selection at Hollywood Bridal in Westminster, where you could rent dresses. I highly recommend Hollywood Bridal if you are looking to rent a wedding dress.

Amy’s Bridal Shop in Westminster. I drive by this shop all the time when I go to work. I went here and the owner was not really friendly..I wouldn’t recommend this place.  LOL. If you want, you can definitely check it out though. There might be something there for you.

Mariposa in Anaheim and Mary Me Bridal in Orange.  The dresses that I liked here were out of my price range..it was so tempting to go over what I budgeted myself! My sister also tried on some bridesmaids dresses at Mary Me Bridal. They have a good selection of bridesmaid dresses there.

Sooo..I finally found my dress at Jinny’s Bridal in Huntington Beach. I always recommend this place! They’re friendly, they have nice dresses and very reasonable prices. My dress was under my budget and I really loved it. I actually saw a girl wearing it when I came there and thought the dress looked really nice. I was like, DANG! She looks hot! LOL..so I told my salesperson that I wanted to try that one on. I narrowed it down to three dresses:

The first one, is the Sottero and Midgley Adorae. I saw a lot of girls trying this dress on. I LOVE the top half..but not a big fan of the bubble bottom half. Plus, this dress was just slightly over my budget and I knew hemming would cost a lot..especially with that bubble bottom.  The top half was very flattering though.

The runner up was the Maggie Sottero Melissa Brooch. I kept going back and forth between this one and the one I actually chose. This dress was so classic looking and timeless. I loved the brooch on the back of the dress. This would be the “safe” way to go.

In the end I chose the Maggie Sottero Anniston. I really loved the lace and pearls..and I loved the vintage feel to it.. and I loved the lace up back! I am so happy with my choice. I got the dress in Ivory.

Just a quick tip, if you’re on a budget and you find a dress you just LOVE..write down the model number and designer and google it! There are tons of websites online such as Once Wed where brides post their wedding dresses up for sale. You can buy it off them!

And don’t forget, if you’re on a budget, make sure you remember that you may need to alter your dress too, so remember to add that alteration cost as well! Dresses with more layers will cost more. And of course, the cost depends on a lot of other things too.

Wedding Day <3:

Phat and I have been so busy the last couple of months! We had our first Thanksgiving and Christmas together as a married couple. I would like to post some pictures up soon. I’m finally starting to move my things into Phat’s condo and we are getting settled in. We still need to choose our pictures for our wedding album too! As part of our package with our photographer, we are to choose 60 photos and he will make a 40 page photo album for us. Is it just us, or do other couples take a while choosing their photos as well? Don’t worry, I plan to get it done asap! It’s so hard choosing 60. I narrowed it down to 180..now I have to keep narrowing it down..eventually I’ll get to 60. It’s so hard because we love all of the photos!
Stay tuned. Sorry for the lack of updates..the holidays were so busy!! Stay Tuned!!

xoxo-Tammy

We got our wedding video over the weekend! Our videographer had our video ready but didn’t send it yet so Phat met our photographer up at another wedding he was working at on Saturday and picked it up from him. Yes, we couldn’t wait any longer!  So we watched the wedding highlight movie he made for us and watching it got me all teary eyed.  For some reason, some of it is hard to watch for me though, maybe because I don’t like watching myself. LOL I get really embarassed.  Along with the highlight video he also put all the raw footage on a hard drive for us. We still have to watch all of those videos! We have 401 files to watch. WOW! Talk about reliving the entire day! I’m excited.  Hopefully we will be able to post the highlight video and some of our favorites from the raw footages onto the blog! 

There’s still so much I want to post on but it’s been kind of crazy lately! Stay tuned!

xoxo!!!

We got our flowers from Boulevard Florist.  As stated in the last post about flowers, I wanted to incorporate Cafe au Lait Dahlias in the wedding. At my second meeting with Ann, she had ordered Dahlias but the wrong kind. Apparently, Cafe Au Lait Dahlias are really hard to find.  Anyways, I put my trust in her and trusted that she’d have the right flower on the wedding day, and she did! Here are some pictures of our flowers that day!

Church Alter Arrangments ~ Cafe Au Lait Dahlias, Lilies, light blue Hydrangeas, Irises, and light yellow roses.

We wanted to use the two alter arrangmets as much as possible, so instead of just using them at church we had them brought over to the house in the morning, then we also used them at the reception for our Thank You pictures with every guest.

Phat's boutonniere ~ Ivory rose

For the groom’s side of the family we got light yellow roses, as well as for the groomsmen, and for the bride’s side of the family we got light pink roses.

Flowers for Mary

For the flowers for Mary, Ann put together an arrangement of ivory roses and lilies.

Bridesmaids' Bouquets!

For the bridesmaids we got light yellow and light pink roses.  For the maid of honor, we did light yellow roses and Cafe Au Lait Dahlias to match the bride.

Groomsmen and their bouquets..lol!! Aren't they pretty?

Bouquet vases for the Girls

I sooo wish that I had a picture of the vases that I made for the girls to put their bouquets in.  This is the only picture I have of them!  Instead of a normal vase, I found vases that were beer mugs! I found them at the vase section at Shinodas and they were heavier so the vase surely couldn’t fall over.  I got light blue ribbon and gold initial stickers to personalize each one for the girls.  I figured they could put the mugs in their freezer and reuse them for a frothy beer! Also, this way the girls could have something to put the flowers  in during the reception.

Sweetheart Table

All of the reception flowers were done by Lifetime Weddings. More dahlias at the sweetheart table!

Centerpieces

For centerpieces we did the standard dendrobium orchids that came with our package.  We thought they turned out perfect and we actually got a lot of compliments on them. yay! Felt good to save some money there.

Bride's Bouquet

For my bouquet she did ivory roses and dahlias. She also threw in some crystals on the roses. Turned out super cute!

Closeup

Toss Bouquet

Ann threw in the toss bouquet for me for free.  I never really realized there was a seperate toss bouquet, I guess I always assumed the bride threw her actual bouquet! lol.

My bridesmaid caught the bouquet!

One of my lovely bridesmaids, Annie caught the bouquet!! It looks like it got a little messed up in the scuffle! Poor yellow rose! lol. You’re next, Annie! Can’t wait!

You couldn’t tell from just looking at them, but I put a lot of work into our escort cards!  I actually had fun designing them.  I know, it’s one of those things that people don’t really even notice and  just toss anyways, but I still got really excited making them! (sad huh. LOL).

I had a lot of different versions of our escort cards. Trial and error baby!  I found a lot of ideas online, but a lot of them were just too much work for something that a lot of people don’t even really look at! I even bought really pretty embellishment stamps because I was planning on embossing EVERY SINGLE escort card. Crazy right?  Anyways, there were a lot of bigger things we needed to worry about, so I didn’t want to create another massive project for just our escort cards, but I still wanted our escort cards to be nice. 

I decided to do something simple but cute. I’m not a graphic artist, but one thing I really like about designing anything is looking at different fonts. I love fonts!  I played around with a lot of different fonts until I found the perfect look for our escort cards. I’m crazy about the font I used for the names. It’s called Sachiko. I like the way some of the letters curl. I don’t remember off the top of my head the names of the other fonts, but I’m pretty sure I used Times for the table numbers.

Here's what the front of each card looked like. Each table number had a different movie title.

Here's what the back of each card looked like. The "XO" went with the design of our english invitations (we had two different invitations-Vietnamese and English! Each had different designs too!)

Each card was individually worked on. Everyone’s names were different lengths so I typed up each card and adjusted font sizes etc. I know, I could have probably just done a merge w/ my database..but I put more love into it this way. 🙂

We chose to put our escort cards on a round table vs. a rectangular table and used our own vases and floating candles for the center.

I printed all the cards at home and used the same color blue paper that we used for part of our invitation. Our photographer actually asked us where we got our cards made, and he was surprised that we made them ourselves!  He said that he liked them a lot. That made me happy! 🙂

We bought our cake from Van’s Bakery on Brookhurst and Hazard.  Before Van’s we had checked out Final Touch and Givalry Bakery. The cakes were beautiful but we thought Van’s was a better deal and I really like their cakes! Delicious.  We got two tiers of strawberry and two tiers of coconut. All I had that night was the coconut, it was so good! I heard from people who had strawberry that it was good too.

We were contemplating getting those old school cakes from the 80’s that had bridges and fountains and fake people on it because we thought it was be hilarious! But..unfortunately, we didn’t end up getting one. Haha..but that would be really funny. Check out the picture below to see what I’m talking about!

We joked about getting a cake like this!! Sorry for the bad photo..I tried to take a good shot, but it was hard with my camera phone..but isn't that the mother of all 80's cakes?!!! Look! The bridges even form a heart! awww

Okay, so here’s our actual cake. Ta Da!

We wanted something classic, so I asked him to do the diagonal lines w/ the dots. I thought it looked cute!

We didn’t end up using the Mickey and Minnie cake topper because I looked every where for those particular figurines and they were sold out every where!!! There’s no rule that says you have to have a caketopper, so we just decided to put flowers on top. Voila!

We got the flowers for the cake from OK Flowers. I wanted Cafe Au Lait Dahlias and ivory roses for the cake, and they did get me dahlias, but not Cafe Au Lait Dahlias! I was fine with it though..I don’t think anybody would really notice. I got my cafe au lait dahlias in my bouquet and everything else so I was fine with it. Whatevs!

For my shower gift, my sister got us this Lenox Jubilee Pearl Cake Knife set. It has small pearls in the clear handles. So glamorous! I love pearls.

The matching champagne flutes also had pearls inside the stems. So cute.

MmmMMM..SO GOOD!

At the end of the night I was actually eating cake w/ my hands!! Couldn’t find any forks around anywhere at the time..lol. Nom nom nom.

Oh yeah! And remember a while back I posted about choosing music for the reception and I posted “This Magic Moment” by Ben E. King and The Drifters? Well..that was what we chose for our cake cutting song! I’m sure nobody noticed but us..but they played it while we cut our cake and I must say, that it was indeed a very magical moment. 😉