Soooo....

I've been kinda distracted and haven't blogged much. I'm getting a little addicted to brides.com. So anyways, updates for venues and vendors:

Church: St. Thomas of Villanova
This is my parish church. For those who know, I put the cap on the number of priests allowed at the alter. I told my mom 3 was the max (in addition to our pastor) and one deacon. I didn't want to end up with like 15 priests up there!

Reception: Radnor Valley Country Club
The space works well for us since it has a nice lobby, which we'll be doing a receiving line in traditional dress. We're doing a 4 course meal, with soup, salad, entree and dessert.

Photographer: Faith West
She's a really nice lady, which is a quality I looked for in photographers. Being in countless weddings and dealing with border line mean photographers, I made it a point to find someone that had a nice demeanor. And plus her photos are amazing! I totally love the custom album and the coffee table magazine. The magazine album is so unique.

DJ: EBE Talent
They are also doing the lighting for the room and dance floor.

Besides that, everything else is still in limbo. Big ticket items left are my dress, flowers and cake.

I was thinking about this for the bridesmaids

I'm not a huge fan of the fabric, so they're being custom made, but using this style.

I have some ideas for my traditional dress, but the colors will be gold and red. Anthony will be in gold.

That's it for now!

The Bling and other stuff

So, here's the ring


















And for those who know me well enough, the prospect of wearing one ring all the time.... hmmm, yea. So now, all my other rings have to go on the right hand...

So, yay me, decided to do the announcement cards myself. We're sending them with the engagement gifts to those who couldn't make the party. Used the martha stewart line of papers. There are cheaper options out there though. Took me forever! It's three layers with vellum wrap and of course a pink bow!



Last but not least, part of the cleaning the night before the party. My doggie Sophie getting "cleaned"

Engagement is done, yay!

So, after days of not sleeping until 2 or 3am, we are finally through the engagement. I took Friday off of work to attempt to finish some last minute favor bags, the announcements and clean the house. The tables and chairs were delivered from Anthony's rentals. They were quite nice. Chairs better be for like $3.50 each! Anyways, we managed to squeeze five 60 inch rounds into the family room.

Here are a few glimpses from the engagement:

I like this picture except for my necklace is inside my dress. grrr.


















Here's mommy and me. The other thing is my bracelet on my right hand was turned in the whole time. That was kinda annoying too.

And, as my favorite auntie calls, here are the million dollar pictures. Don't mistake the smiles for smiles, hehe. It's actually me, my mom and my other auntie laughing. In my culture, there's no kneeling on one knee for the proposal, hence the laughing.














Anywho, will post the link for my favorite pictures soon, as there are lots and lots! Also, I'll post the new bling soon, as soon as I figure out the settings on my camera.

BTW: blogger sucks with the html editor thingie. It doesn't do as I want it. Don't have time to re-do my post in html right now, so I'll fix it later. For now, deal with the funky formatting.

Ao dai for Engagement

Whew! Ordered the ao dai last week for the engagement ceremony. They assure me it'll come by the last week of October. I got them online at aodaivinh. They're really good. Just email them with any questions and they answer back. You can ask them to change the neckline on any dress too.

I ordered these two. Hopefully one will work ok. Mommy didn't like any of the ones I already had. Real pictures will come after the ceremony!

Oh yea, I guess I never explained the ceremony. Well, in my culture, I guess in most Asian cultures, traditionally, the engagement is planned by both sets of parents, hence an engagement is "scheduled." Typically, the date is selected based on time of year and horoscope stuff I don't get. But anywho, so, the groom's parents bring "gifts" to present to the bride's family. The gifts typically are champagne, tea, biscuits, and other sweets, all wrapped in cellophane. So, the groom's family brings this to the bride's family and asks for the engagement. When my parents accept, they call me down from my room and then he "proposes" which actually is just him giving me the ring. Then we serve tea and champagne (we have Moet Chandon on slate. I'm very excited). Then, in true family fashion, we eat, drink and party hardy.

We're wrapping the gifts this weekend, so I'll post them next time. They'll go in the cute pink bags I made.

Engagement gift bags and napkins

I decided to DYI the gift bags instead of ordering them pre-printed. It saves a ton of money. I ordered paper bags with the roped handles from Paper Mart online. I highly recommend this website. You can find tons of other supplies, such as boxes, tissue paper and ribbons pretty inexpensively.

Here's what my bags look like. I made the sticker myself using photoshop. I put the date of the engagement party at the very bottom. Hard to see in the picture. I ran the label through a Xyron 510 machine (you can get much larger ones, but this one fits a max of 5 inches). The Xyron can do stickers, laminated stickers and magnets. The ones I did are laminated. You'll need like 2 cartridges for 50 4x4 labels.

I also ordered cocktail napkins from thediscountprinter.com. I found the best price for monogrammed napkins on this site. They came in pretty good. I'm satisfied with them. I might also order them for the wedding.

Wedding website

So, to add to my list of "not updating very often" is now our official wedding website. Please visit it at mai-linhandanthony.weddings.com. I will "update" it as new information emerges.

Engagement Invitations

It's official! Invitations went out last week! No going back now because I've spent good money on invitations.

I highly recommend Anna Griffin invitations if you want to DIY. Since it's only for the engagement, I didn't obsess with matching all invites, so I decided to pick my favorite ones. I went with two sets of Anna Griffin, one pink gatefold with a pink ribbon and the other was a green vellum cover with a green ribbon. Excellent paper for ink jet printing. It had to be like a 110#. These cards come at like $3.50-$3.75 a piece, so don't mess up! I used a Canon i80 printer, which only required the paper to go in one direction, so great for heavy card stock. My other choice was from Paper Prince xxox collection, two layer (brown outer layer with ecru inlay) and a vellum cover and ivory bow. Super cute. Paper also excellent. A little more cost effective at about 2 bucks a piece.

To the left is the 'green vellum' invite and to the right is the 'pink gatefold' invite.

Here's the XXOX brown and ecru invite with the vellum wrap and bow.

I do not recommend Crane's printable invitations (don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Crane's).

I got these invitations for non-family and other friends as an alternative to the "expensive" invites. While the weight is great and paper is very pretty, ink does not respond well to the paper. It ends up being kinda of light. It does look cool because of the silvery finish, but all in all, I would get these invites either laser printed or thermo'ed.

What makes you think I'll blog....

Ok, so I'm enormously bad at keeping up with these things. Yes, I do have a myspace, facebook, orkut, etc., account but do I ever do anything with them? No, not really. I just happen to forget all the time that they exist. But, I've started this blog mainly because I have lots of ideas to share when it comes to event planning. This comes to light because I now am planning both my engagement and wedding at the moment. The big "engagement day" is November 3rd, which is traditional to schedule. Hence, I'm "unofficially" engaged until that date. Next blog will talk about the tradition involved and my "fun" planning to date. Welcome to my blog, or rather, lack of blogging....