Wedding updates

1 month and 20 days into marriage life, I'm leading a blissful life with my husband. Now I have one more family who dotes on me. I've vowed to be a good wife, good daughter-in law and a good future mother. Well, I'm learning to bake, iron clothes, cut fruits, and maybe cook. All those mentioned, I've never done it in my singlehood life. I'm not spoilt, it's just that my parents used to do those for me. Now a married woman, I've to start learning daily chores. It's quite an enjoyable process if you look at it positively.

Looking back on our wedding day..

Everything went smoothly on our wedding day, there wasn't any major glitches or delays. This wouldn't be possible without the help of brothers and sisters who coordinated everything perfectly. Special mention goes to our chief coordinators - Ben and Joc. Everything was under their control and they made sure timings and schedule are strictly adhered to, that's why I see no delays or overrun on each event. Throughout the whole day, I wasn't bothered/stressed by any unwanted decision-making. I was a super happy bride that day, tiredness didn't overwhelm me, all because I have efficient people who helped me settle everything. I want to thank every single one of you who has contributed their time and effort to our wedding - families, sisters, brothers, and friends. Relatives and guests who turned up to give their blessings and share our joy, we really appreciate it.

Our photos from our photographer are not ready yet, so I'm really glad some of you helped to take photos with your cams.

Guo Da Li was on leap year 29.02.12. It was an auspicious date given by the temple.
Clement's sister was the Mei Por whose main duty is to deliver the items and give my parents the Pin Jin and Pin Li.

Guo Da Li items nicely placed in Mei Por's basket

Oranges, fa cai, red dates, rock sugar, oysters, are some of the many items

Everything comes in pairs

 

Guy's side would give liquor while gal's side would return concentrated orange juice.

Cakes from Pine Garden. Highly recommended for such occasions!

 After receiving the items and cakes, we need to go to relatives' places to distribute the cakes. It was a tiring day but it was a good catch-up session with the relatives.

Our customised M&Ms flown in from US finally reached us one week before our wedding day.

My bridal nails from Junying who's doing a home-based nail business. Her works are extremely professional and worth for money. I think no nail salon can match up to her designs for that price.
Even the Japanese praised my pretty nails when we went to Japan for our minimoon.

Pretty acrylic nails from Thistlebelle Nail.

I searched high and low for a suitable necklace for our wedding dinner. Finally found it the day before. Very pricy but its definitely worth its price. 

Elegant necklace from Swarovski

Collected our wedding portrait which is half as big as me

 Initially we placed deposit for a Porsche Cayman but we were given the pigeon. Luckily I was able to find a replacement. It was quite a reasonable deal for the new model of SLK. Larling finally drove a sports car! Haha.

New model of SLK rental from WeddingCars.sg

My Hen's night with my sisters.. It was a simple fanfare like having crab dinner and staycation at MBS playing Bananagrams the whole night :) The girls rented a car so that we can move around more conveniently. I love it simple and wouldn't like it to be wild partying. Thanks my girls for the wonderful day!

Pretty Limaran

The girls brought me to Melben for crab as I mentioned I haven't been there yet. The crabs are really yummy!

Crab claw as huge as my face

At the infinity pool

Skypark

Romantic night with the ladies :)

Here's snippets of the actual day..

Larling prepared six little piggies filled with coins for my sisters! How sweet!

Piggies for the sisters

Pressie from my bestie Cheryl

Very spontaneous and helpful brothers. I'm really glad larling have such nice brothers to help him throughout the wedding.

Thank you: Kaichou, Darius, Ernest, Zhemin, Ben and Wei Jie

Haha cute dance pose!

And of course my wonderful sisters who planned the fantastic gatecrashing and gave all their energy and time to me on that day, thank you so much.

Wei Ping, Jocelyn, Joan, Shi Wei, Cheryl, Limaran and Cynthia

The sweet love contract which my sisters asked Larling to promise..

Love contract done by Cheryl and Joan

We went to Punggol for some photo-taking as it was along the way to Larling's house.

It's bouquet-throwing time!

I love this pic with the sun streaks

Super heart this photo!

Tang Yuan

With Larling's cousins :)

My family-in-law

Sisters waiting patiently while we enjoy our Tang Yuan

My elder brother couldn't be out to see me marry off according to tradition.. :(

With Mummy and Daddy

Love daddy

Banquet at Shangri-La Hotel

Our solemnisation was held in the Hibiscus Room with close family and friends attending..

Mini march-in

JP Ho reading out the vows

Lawfully wedded

Sealed with a kiss

Nice edit by Kwang

We have to thank our emcees for the night, Stella and Samuel who gave the honour to be our emcees. They are the best presenters of our group during uni days. We have no qualms that they'll do a very good job and we were right. It was a nicely done job by both of them :)

Our Emcees - Samuel and Stella

Marching-in was fun! You do it only twice in a lifetime and I think I really enjoyed it.

First march-in

Hi!

We invited Yours Truly live band for entertainment for the night. We have Ein Ein on the piano, Kexin and Sugie on vocals. I think they've done a great job although I manage to hear only a couple of songs. Kexin was gorgeous and she sang really well! On the other hand I heard Sugie's standards have dropped by a fair bit, but still no regrets hiring the team!

I'm so touched that three-quarter of my JC classmates turned up for my wedding dinner. Kai Leong even rendered his help in gathering the addresses so that I can send them the invitation card. Very happy to have such nice classmates!

TJC classmates!

Hosting your own wedding dinner is so much fun and exciting! It's not as tiring and scary as what people always describe (maybe I have helpful brothers and sisters doing all the work, which is why I don't feel tired at all! haha). This could be the few moments of your life whereby the highlight is on you for the entire night. It was like a fairytale whereby when it strikes midnight, you'll be back to the normal usual self, but the happy ending still remains as it is.. :)

Bridal Studio - My Dream Wedding

Last month we went down to choose our outfits for pre-wedding photoshoot and saw our studio is gone! Then we realised My Dream Wedding actually moved few doors down and has expanded tremendously. They previously occupied a small unit which has room for only two brides at a time for gown-fitting. Now their new location is much more spacious and grand. Three brides can do their gown-fitting at the same time, they even have separate areas for photo choosing, hairdo and makeup, and table discussion. We were really impressed. Their move came quite unexpected and I think we've gotten ourselves a good deal!

The block with the red windows is My Dream Wedding.

Not very sure if the second floor belongs to them as well

Looks really spacious right

Tux shirts have very cute mini collars

Larling in tux

Groom can select two tuxs while the bride has three gowns.

And we could bring our casual clothes for shoot as well.

The good thing about taking up a package with the studio instead of ala carte is that you'll have the entire entourage following you during the shoot and you don't need to source your outfits separately.

The down side is, their in-house photographers' works will not be as fun and creative of those reknown photographers like Chris Ling, Mindy Tan, IanPhotography etc.

Of course it all boils down to time and budget.

Choosing reknown photographers = $$$

Going ala carte = time

Being a lazy and practical person, taking up the package is still the best choice for me. :)

Some of the gowns..

Short one for outdoor beach shoot

One of my fav:

Night gown in red

My colleague says I looked like 小倩.. Oh man

12 more days to the shoot..

So exciteeed!

Selection of bridal studio. Checked.

Finally we're embarking on the planning of our wedding, and the actual day most likely to be held in early dragon year, i.e. March 2012. Initially we thought of the dates 11/11/2011 or 20/11/2011, but all these auspicious-looking dates for wedding banquets in our shortlisted hotels are quite fully booked, so we decided to push it back to 2012 to give us more choices and time to prepare.



There's so much to do for wedding preparation and planning..

1. Picking an auspicious date

2. Bridal studio

3. Pre-wedding photoshoot

4. Banquet hotel venue

5. Selection of gown

6. Actual day photographer

7. Solemnisers

8. Guest invitations

I guess the list goes on but the above should be the more impt ones.



Currently we've settled on the bridal studio after shortlisting 3 candidates - Le Grand, Blue Bay and My Dream Wedding. Le Grand's gowns are known for their pretty classy designs, Blue Bay is reknown for their Taiwan photoshoots, and My Dream Wedding is quite all rounded in their gowns and photoshoot.

Le Grand was the first studio that we popped by.. After we flipped through the first local album that they showed us, Larling and I totally fell in love with those pics as they didn't look like they were taken in Sg. Le Grand collaborates with Chris Ling Photographers - a very well known name in the wedding industry which explains the quality of the photos. Next, the coordinator explained that their gowns are all designed by their own team of designers, thus guaranteed that no duplicate of design can be found outside. Very nice. But price wise is on the steep side and from what I can see in the bridal studio, their range of gowns are quite limited. Also, there's no accompanying make-up artist/assistant during the outdoor photoshoot, so it means there'll be no one there to change my hairstyle, reapply my makeup and change my gowns for me while outside! That was quite huge deciding factor for me.

Next, Bluebay Wedding. Their Taiwan shoots are really beautiful if you go look at their website. We were quite gian to go overseas for photoshoot, but after much consideration, it's the places that must have a meaning/memories to us, if not we would just be taking the nice sceneries with no purpose at all. Though they are offering us an attractive price for their package, we are not convinced that their coordinators in Sg are experienced enough to render us tiptop service.

Before we decide on either of the above, we went to check out My Dream Wedding. MDW's base in HK is quite influential and they have celebrities like Bosco, Charlene Choi etc as their models. We were so tempted to take their HK package as their studio is so damn pretty!! But gg there just to take photos in their studio is so duhh. Anyway their overall package that they quoted us is the best amongst the three, although their local photoshoot is less comparable to Chris Ling's, but their gown range is so much bigger and they would provide transportation, photographer, asst-photog, and a makeup artist during the photoshoot! This makes a whole lot of difference to me.

And so we signed the contract and sealed the deal with My Dream Wedding! Looking forward to the photoshoot.. But we need to brainstorm some storyline and venues first..........

Polaroid taken at My Dream Wedding

They took a photo of us, then I requested one more for keepsake.

Lol.

Next up.. Shortlisting hotels for wedding banquet!