Sep 15, 2010 | wedding planning, Weddings
It seems to me that there are two kinds of wedding guests. There are close friends and family, who feel involved in everything at the wedding and the reception. And then there are the more distant guests: acquaintances, associates, friends of the family, and people there with a date.
Some of my clients have been acutely aware of the predicament of the more distant type of guest. They have instructed me to keep the reception activities moving along and interesting so people don’t get bored. There are also a few other things you can do to help those guests, if you want to.
Few people are bored when there is a band playing. Photo courtesy of christytylerphotography.com.
Just playing music, either live or from a DJ, can help the guests have something to do. If there are performers, there is something to watch. And if you are in an interesting location (a historic house or building, a park, etc.) your guests may find ways to amuse themselves without any help.
If you’re having a seated meal, try to seat your guests at tables where they have something in common with another guest. If you are having a cocktail reception, ask a member of the wedding party or a close friend to keep an eye out for the people who look like they aren’t talking to anyone and introduce them to family or friends.
And think about whether or not you ask your acquaintances to bring a date. A guest who doesn’t know anyone will enjoy themselves much more if they bring someone to talk to.
In the end, though, your guests will have to fend for themselves. Most people know what they are getting in to when they go to a wedding where they don’t know anyone. The outgoing ones among them will meet people. The rest will have a pleasant evening.
Sep 10, 2010 | Budget Planning, Family Parties, Parties and Special Events, wedding planning, Weddings
Can you find a caterer to do this? Photo by Happy Buddy PhotoArt.
I find that one of the hardest things for my clients in planning events is hiring a caterer. I admit that it can be a complicated process. If you break it down into smaller steps, it gets a little easier.
One of the first things you can consider when choosing a caterer is whether to hire a big catering firm or a smaller one. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages.
A small caterer is likely to be more flexible in menus and pricing. Sometimes they can come up with a special dish just for you. You are more likely to get the personal touch from a smaller firm. There is also more variety: Small companies specialize in different things and each one is different. On the flip side, some small caterers can not handle very large crowds. They don’t always have the office staff to return calls promptly. And they aren’t on the preferred caterer list of many of the larger venues.
Large caterers often have an event coordinator/sales person on staff who is your contact from beginning to end. This person is not generally a substitute for your own event planner but is another pair of hands and another experienced professional working for you. The largest caterers also often hire extra serving staff. I just worked on a wedding with catering by Wolfgang Puck. They hired at least 20 servers for 175 guests, including one server who only looked after the bride and groom. It’s great to have extra people working at your event. But you pay for size and service. And you generally have to work with the caterer’s preset menus.
If you’re planning to hire a caterer soon, take a look at the size of the catering company. See what they have to offer. That ought to help you narrow down your choices.
Aug 30, 2010 | Day-of Coordinating, Weddings
I worked with a truly lovely couple this weekend on their wedding. It was at the magnificent South Shore Cultural Center. I have been to many events there and I was delighted finally to be able to work on a wedding there. It is one of the nicest sites for a wedding in the Chicago area, if you want my opinion.
My amateur photo of the wedding program. Better pictures to come soon.
It was one of those days when everything goes perfectly. That was partly due to the rigorous planning the bride and groom insisted on. (You should have seen their spreadsheet with everyone’s schedule on it. I was most impressed!) And it was partly just good luck. Well, the linens were an hour late being delivered (and you can’t start to put things on tables until the linens arrive), but the caterer, Wolfgang Puck, had twenty servers, so there were plenty of pairs of hands to get everything done in time.
And then everything ran like clockwork: Ceremony, photographs, cocktail hour, toasts, cake cutting, dinner, dancing, bouquet toss…. The highlight of the reception, as far as I was concerned, was the bride’s father’s toast. He had written and performed a song for his daughter and son-in-law about how they met. It was humorous and very well done. He’s clearly no amateur at these things. It was a surprise for the bride and groom, and I was standing where I could see their faces. They were clearly enjoying it. The groom had expected his father-in-law to do something unusual, but I think even he was pleasantly surprised by the form it took.
The other thing that was unusual about this wedding was the bride’s attitude. Even though she had planned everything down to the last detail, at the rehearsal the day before when she handed me the last of the paperwork, she said, “I don’t care if you do everything exactly the way I drew it. Just make it pretty.” She knew what she wanted, but she also trusted me enough to let me make the last-minute decisions. That was a real blessing when we were setting up. Sometimes a bride’s vision doesn’t quite fit with the reality of, say, the amount of space on a table, or the size of the floral centerpieces. But, since I could use my best judgment, everything was pretty, very pretty.
Aug 24, 2010 | Eco-Friendly Events, vendors, wedding planning, Weddings
One of Lynn's designs. Shamelessly stolen from her website.
I’ve been wanting to tell you about Pollen floral studio for a while. Lynn Fosbender, the owner, is definitely someone to know if you need flowers for an event. While her primary interest is in eco-friendly floral design, the thing that impresses me the most about her is her creative thinking. She recently worked with some clients of mine who were mostly interested in creative ideas, and they loved her and the flowers for their wedding.
I like her approach to eco-friendly flowers, as well. She tries to use local, organic flowers whenever possible. And she composts all of her plant waste in two 50 gallon composters on the roof! You can see the extent of her commitment to all things sustainable on her website.
And I know this won’t impress most people, but I love the fact that Lynn has thorough contracts with her clients. You may have heard me griping about the contracts most florists have. Lynn is a major exception to that rule. She tells you what you will be getting, how much it will cost, and when it will show up.
And did I mention she does beautiful work and is fun to work with?
Aug 18, 2010 | wedding planning, Weddings
I found this post about weddings and marriage recently. Whether you agree with its implied politics or not, it does say a lot about wedding traditions, including a number of things I did not know before. I had heard that in the Middle Ages weddings were not conducted in churches, although I did not know why. And I had no notion where the tradition of tossing the garter came from. (It’s a little appalling, actually.) Take a look and see what you think.
Aug 9, 2010 | Day-of Coordinating, wedding planning, Weddings
I love a good rainstorm. There’s nothing like the sound of a good, old-fashioned Midwestern thunderstorm. Unless it’s 5:30 in the morning on the day of an outdoor morning wedding.
Redfield Estate at The Grove
The bride, the groom, and I had been planning for months to have the ceremony and the reception outdoors at the lovely Redfield Estate at The Grove in Glenview. Naturally, we had a rain plan, but not one of us wanted to implement it. We all arrived before 8:00 in the morning and had to decide whether to move indoors or not. By then, the weather seemed to be clearing, but the lawn was very soggy.
We walked about to see whether we could do anything outdoors. Fortunately, the area around the gazebo where they wanted to have the ceremony was dry enough. After about a half an hour, I made an executive decision: We would have the ceremony outdoors but would serve lunch indoors, not on the damp and soggy lawn. The florist, the string quartet, and the sound rental company could all begin to set up.
Despite the late start and the uncertainties of the weather, this turned out to be a wonderful wedding. The bride and groom wanted a casual occasion where their friends and families could enjoy themselves. I think they succeeded amazingly well. The ceremony was personal and unique. It was bilingual to honor the groom’s French heritage and family. And it was followed by a receiving line and coffee and pastry.
The flowers, by Lynn Fosbender at Pollen, were perfectly French country: Sunflowers, lavender, a few lilies, etc. (I’ll have photos in a few weeks and you can judge for yourself.)
Then there was a lunch buffet, catered by Dave’s Specialty Foods, followed by dancing. Meanwhile, the bridal party went to decorate the newlyweds’ getaway car. They went all out, with streamers, cans, writing on the windows–and filling the car entirely with balloons.
This was a very personal occasion and a very fun one–just like the people who got married.
Jul 27, 2010 | Day-of Coordinating, Weddings
The bride was heading toward the altar when she discovered the cake wasn't there.
The bride came down the staircase of her parents’ home on her way to the altar in the back yard. In her rather emotional state, she just noticed that the wedding cake was not on the dining room table where she expected it to be. “Where is the cake?” she asked her wedding coordinator. “It’s on its way. Don’t worry,” was the reply. And by the time dinner was served, the cake was on the table. The bride and the groom were perfectly content.
Now, here’s what really happened: The mercury that day was over 90 degrees. A more experienced baker probably would have frozen the cake so that the buttercream frosting didn’t melt. But this baker just loaded the cake into her van and drove through the heat. By the time she reached the house, the cake had imploded. Someone buttonholed me before she went back to her kitchen, so I had a minute to talk to her. Needless to say, she was in a bit of a panic.
“What time do you have to have the cake here?” she asked me.
“You have exactly three hours,” I said.
“I’ll be back before then.” And she was. She ended up bringing a small wedding cake and a sheet cake, instead of the larger cake she had promised. But it was still a small miracle that she managed to deliver at all.
Now, when the bride came downstairs and saw that there was no cake, I knew that the cake had fallen and that the baker was, at that moment, frantically re-baking it. But there was no way I was going to let on to the bride that anything was wrong. She had been very stressed earlier in the day, and I didn’t want her worrying as she went to marry her sweetheart. Nor did I want to lie to her. So, I told her the minimum amount of information she needed to know and made sure she didn’t worry. Her family and friends didn’t have to deal with the situation. And, in the end, everyone was happy.
Jul 18, 2010 | Day-of Coordinating, Weddings
I just got the photos from the wedding I wrote about back in May. They are really nice photos and are all posted in my photo gallery. Click on the photo below to go straight to the pictures from this wedding. Many thanks to Christy Tyler for sharing her photos.
Photo courtesy of christytylerphotography.com.
Jul 12, 2010 | wedding planning, Weddings
One step in the process of wedding planning: decor. Photo courtesy of Agnes Malorney.
A cousin of mine recently announced his engagement to the lovely woman he has been seeing for a few years. The family is thrilled. When I sent them my congratulations, I also let them know I’d be happy to help them with the wedding planning. Today, I got an e-mail from them asking if I had any advice on where to find a wedding planning checklist and how to get started planning. Here is what I wrote to them:
Dear Cousins,
For wedding checklists, there are probably 100 to be found on the internet and in wedding magazines. They are all a lot alike. I think the best thing to do is to take any random one you find and tailor it to your own use. For myself, I would put it into an Excel spreadsheet, but there are lots of ways to make it useful. Delete all the things that don’t apply to you. If you don’t know yet if something is relevant, hang onto it for now and see if it is needed.
At this point, the three or four things you probably need to be working on are all interconnected: date of the wedding; location of the ceremony; officiant, if that doesn’t come with the location; location of the reception (assuming you are having a reception–I make no assumptions); and finding a caterer for the reception (assuming ditto). Of course, there are a lot of other decisions you will need to make in order to make those few decisions, so you may end up working backwards a little and then going forwards. After you have that framework in place, then you can look for other vendors to help you: florist; photographer; wedding coordinator; clothing; rings; jewelry, etc.. Then it will be time to work on decorative stuff (assuming you aren’t planning to do it all yourself–because if you are, you need to start on that yesterday): invitations (functional as well as decorative, of course!), any other paper goods, reception decor, if any, etc. After that, there will be a lot of little details.
I will caution you about two things: There is the thing that NPR’s Car Guys call the Wedding-Industrial Complex (or the “Marital-Industrial Complex”). It is real and it can be dangerous. It is the bridal industry’s marketing machine that wants you to believe that you can’t have a wedding without having all the stuff provided by all the various vendors. Don’t buy into it. It’s not true. All you really need in order to have a wedding is the two of you and someone who can sign the paperwork–and in some states you need witnesses. Everything else is optional. I like to advise my clients to do the things that have some meaning for them and to skip anything else (unless it makes your parents happy, for instance). So, don’t believe the hype. Just do the things that will make you happy.
And here’s the other thing: There are a lot of scams in the wedding industry. There are unscrupulous vendors who know that you’ve never done this before, and they will not hesitate to jack up prices or insist that you do things their way. But there are also lots of vendors who will help you to do what you really want to do. Make sure you find those and steer clear of the others. Trust your instincts. If it doesn’t smell right, it probably isn’t right.
Take a look at this previous post of mine, this one and also this one for some tips on how to protect yourself against some of the most common scams and pitfalls of the wedding industry. There is also a wealth of resources on my non-traditional weddings page, including some on the same topic. And feel free to keep asking. It’s my pleasure to help you two have a wonderful wedding!
Jul 6, 2010 | Eco-Friendly Events, vendors, wedding planning, Weddings
I generally like to feature vendors I have worked with directly, but I have been so taken with Tweedle Press that I thought I ought to pass along the good news. Nina, the owner of the press, does all letterpress printing. I didn’t really know what letterpress was until I visited her studio and she showed me the 70 year old, heavy machines that print by putting an impression on the paper. This is printing with texture. She also makes her own paper sometimes, which makes for even more texture.
She also does design, so it’s a one-stop shop for wedding or party invitations; menus; thank-you cards; or any other paper goods. Her commitment to environmental practices is strong, too. The only possible drawback is price: Her prices are best for large orders. It’s beautiful work, though, so you might find that it’s worth it to spend a little more for beautiful, stylish, eco-friendly paper goods.
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