Friends and relatives from near and far made it to your wedding to especially share and celebrate the joyous occasion with both of you and your families. Shouldn’t you reciprocate with a token of appreciation? The question is what wedding favours to give. We had many brainstorming sessions before deciding on our wedding favours. We wanted one that not only ties in with our theme but also is a remembrance of our wedding. In the end we opted for potpourri because the floral scent and colourful petals fitted our garden theme perfectly.

I part DIY my wedding favours. I bought the potpourri and packed it into organza pouches decorated with tiny roses on the front. I printed our names, wedding date and a thank you note onto a small card which was then threaded with a gold string to the potpourri pouches. In total, I spend less than RM500 for 700 wedding favours.

With a little creativity, you can have great wedding favours without spending much. If you have some creative ideas and would like to personalized a gift for your guests, what better time to do it than now! Show your appreciation with a personal touch. If you like to bake, you can bake some cookies, cup cakes or even brownies and packed them in small decorated plastic bags, boxes or tins. You can even make kaya, preserves and chutneys, which can all be presented in miniature jars with your very own label.

For the music lover, you can compile a list of love songs that you played during your wedding onto a CD for each of your guests to take home to remind them of the wonderful evening.

1, 2, 3 say cheeze! Photographs are a great memento of the special day. This is an excellent idea for a wedding favour. Most guests will appreciate a copy of the photos they take with the bride and bridegroom. Compile photographs of the day’s event and all the candid moments you share with your love ones, relatives and friends. Place them onto a CD for each guest. They will love you for the beautiful memories.

Whatever you decide to give as favours, the most important thing to make sure (other than there being enough to go around) is that your favours are meaningful. It is a piece of memory for your guests to remember you by.

Last Saturday, we were invited to a wedding and our names were no where to be found in the guest list. Imagine our horror and the embarrassment when the reception had to call up the groom to check if we were the guest.

Could all the hiccups be minimized when drawing up the guest list? Drawing up the guest list is one of the most stressful things if not executed properly. As the saying, too many cooks spoil the broth. Usually the invitations are divided into three groups – the bride and groom, and the bride and groom’s respective families.

After choosing the venue, the parties involved should sit down and draw up the list of who they want to invite, taking into consideration the seating capacity of the venue. You wouldn’t want to squeeze fifty tables into a capacity of thirty and packed your guests like sardines in a can! Usually for first wedding in the family, parents are more excited than the bride and bride groom and want to invite everyone even the ones they don’t know well. It’s like they have somehow missed out on their own wedding and have to crash their children’s wedding.

This inevitably causes problems, as everyone will have conflicting ideas on who should and shouldn’t be invited. Your mother will insist on inviting aunties and uncles you never knew you had, while your father-in-law-to-be will want to invite all his colleagues and business associates. And to top it all off, your fiancé wants to invite his drinking pals. You’ll be left wondering if there will be any room for your friends.

Looking back, we should have put our foot down when it comes to the invited guests. When we planned our wedding our venue had the seating capacity for seventy tables of which forty five tables are guests whom we don’t even know. Even if we were to bump into each other on the street, we wouldn’t even recognize them. That is why it’s important to streamline your guests and invite people who mean most to you and are sincerely happy for you. In the end it really boils down into what kind of wedding celebration you have in mind.

These are a few lessons I have learn after planning for my wedding. Hopefully you can find it useful.

1. Allow yourself plenty of time to plan the guest lists, Do not do it under a time constrain. You’ll be stress out, temper’s will flare and in the end you might not even have a wedding to plan.

2. Have in mind what kind of wedding you want. Is it something small and cozy or big and extravagance? If you have set your heart on a venue, work you guest list around the venue’s seating capacity. Or plan out the number of guests you want to invite and find a place that can accommodate all your guests. No hard and fast rule on this. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

3. However, do take into consideration your budget. Will you be able to afford the cost of the wedding dinner for 100 tables in the event that your red envelopes would not cover? You would not want to start the journey of your marriage saddled with debts. Unless you are the heir of Hilton or one of the children of Sultan, do not plan a wedding that is over your means. One way is to cut back on the guests you are inviting. Quality is better than quantity.

4. Another challenge is deciding on the people you would really want to share the special day. Naturally you are on top of the world and is excited to announce to the world that you are getting married, regardless of whether you actually keep in touch with them or not. You may even feel that you have to invite everyone you know for fear of offending them if you don’t. However, if you barely know each other, they’ll probably understand why they were not invited. They would be relieved too as they would be able to save on the red envelopes.

It’s better to have guest who are genuinely happy for you rather than those who attend for the free food. One of my father-in-law’s business associate asked his staff to attend our wedding on his behalf. In the end this person ended up raiding our free flow bar, gotten drunk and nearly crashed our toasting session! Experiences like this make me wish I could undo the past and redo my wedding.

5. Is it going to be an adult only affair or are children included? If your seating capacity is packed to the maximum, I’ll suggest you leave out the children. If you can afford to fit in a few extra guests, include only those of your very close relatives and friends.

6. Run through and compare the lists that both families and all parties involved have prepared. Check, double check and triple check that no one important has been left out. Make sure the parties involved each have a complete set of the master guest list. In that way you can be sure all invited guest have a place for dinner.

My husband and I once went to a wedding reception where the bride and groom thought that we are in their parents’ guest lists and vice versa. Well, this assumption left us with no seats at the wedding dinner.

7. Organize the seating plan. Make sure you sit people whom they are comfortable with together. Never make the mistake of seating your Great Aunt who has not been on talking terms with your second aunt together. You’ll end up with a scene. And you are definitely not the centre of attention!

8. Arrange your guest lists in alphabetical order, it makes it easier for the reception and usher to show your guests their table.

9. Who pays for the wedding gets to decide? We wanted to pay for our own wedding but one set of parents insists on picking up the tab and keeping the red envelopes. This is a tricky situation and is best settled in the early part of the planning. Give and take wherever is required. I strongly prefer to pay for the wedding myself so that I can control the overall direction of the wedding plan.

As I look back on my wedding, it was the sincere people who made the event what it was. So think about what’s really important to you – what you absolutely have to have, and what you can do without.

Hopefully these sharing can make your guest planning easier for you.

It was 16 July 2006. He had to stop by his mum’s place to grab some stuff and I went along with him. The moment he open the door, we were greeted by family members for my surprised birthday party. After blowing out the candles, he gave me three choices on a dessert tray. What are the odds? I actually chose correctly i.e. a slice of moist chocolate cake. Well, everyone was fooled. It was actually a ring box wrapped in a water proof paper and coated with chocolate syrup. He got down on one knee and he proposed.

Love is in the air. You’ve found your perfect other half and it’s time to pop the question. How will you propose? Will you get down on one knee at a romantic dinner? Or are you looking for something more creative? If you are someone who is fond of PDA “Public display of affection” you can follow in the footsteps of David Tan who pop his RM54,000 proposal on the billboard along the LDP on 14 February 2008.

http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/2/15/nation/20336463&sec=nation

Here are 10 creative ideas

1. Nothing is more sexy than a man showing his talent in the kitchen for the woman he love. Cook and set a romantic candlelight dinner for two. Serve her a glass of her favorite drink with the ring frozen in an ice cube. When she realizes what is in her drink, get down on one knee and ask her to marry you.

2. Arrange with your local bakery or restaurant to bake a cake with your proposal written on it. Remember to personalized it with her name and put it on the display case. Take her to the joint for dinner and ask her to choose a cake for dessert. When she sees the cake, drop down on one knee, pull out the ring, and ask her to marry you.

3. If you like the idea of being on top of the world. You can propose to her 500 feet from the ground by arranging a hot air balloon ride. As both of you enjoy the beautiful sunset, tell her how much you love her and ask her to marry you.(www.airshipflight.com)

4. Learn some magic tricks to entertain her. As a finale, mysteriously make a ring box appear and propose to her.

5. Make a booking at the cinema for a private screening and rent an ad space for your proposal. If you like to make your proposal a family affair, you could also invite them along. It is a really fabulous opportunity to experience the exclusivity. One very important detail though, other than popcorn make sure you have the ring with you! (For more details check out www.tgv.com.my and www.gsc.com.my)

6. Make a dedication on her usual radio station. Time it with your drive to a romantic spot. Preferably have the car top down. When she hears your public declaration, proposed to her under the blanket of stars and top it off with champagne and strawberries.

7. Bring her to a funfair. Pre-arrange with the game stall vendor to win her a “prize” when you throw the ball and hit the target (make sure you practice your throw, you wouldn’t want to be there the whole night!). When she realises the prize is a diamond ring, proposed to her.

8. If she’s an animal lover, get her a puppy. Tie the ring to it’s collar ribbon. When she sees the ring, get down on your knees and propose.

9. Create a scrapbook, filled with love letters, cards, photographs, mementos and the list is endless. Do a journaling on each page so that the scrapbook can tell a story. Preserving precious memories is a great way to show your love and let her know you cherish your time together. And what better ways for the closing then with a marriage proposal?

10. Organize a party and play pass the parcel. In preparation for the game, wrap the ring in several layers of wrapping paper. Whoever is holding the parcel when the music stops removes one layer of wrapping and perform a challenge or forfeit (go wild with your ideas and have fun!) that has been pre-written on each layer. Arrange with the person who starts and stops the music to ensure the ring stops at her. When she unwraps it and gets to the ring, and ask her to marry you.

What other ideas do you have? Share it with us!

Do you think the charges of a wedding make up artist (MUA) are over priced? My MUA charged me RM600 for a day and night session. If I were to do a make-over for an event/function, the charges are only less than half of it. Although weddings are important affairs but expenses like these can often prove to be budget busters.

Other than relying on professional make up artists, why not indulge in the following tips to get an “extreme” makeover at a fraction of the price?

If you are on a tight budget and if you have more than one wedding dinner at different locations, finding a reliable make up artist can prove to be an impossible task. Consider the may self-help guides available on the internet. There are many helpful make up tutorials online and I’ve linked a few videos below for your perusal.

For those who can’t doll up to save their lives, fret not, here’s another alternative – Take up a beauty make up course. After surveying the market for the fees on make up courses, I realise that it’s probably more economical and practical in the long run to pick up a set of life skills which could prove to be a lifesaver for me and my girlfriends! There’s an abundance of make up courses in the market and it is worth exploring this option, seeing that the fees is probably only a couple of hundreds more than what you have to pay for just one full day wedding session (i.e. day and night make up). Go for the reputable brands and survey the schools for their training facilities and credentials before you make a decision. Who knows, you might even decide to venture into your own business of providing make up!

Last but not least, dig up your address book for contacts in the fashion industry! They are probably more in tuned with the latest make up tricks and trends, plus I’m sure your friends will not mind to help you out in your hour of need!

Needless to say, you’ll want the wedding to be perfect and, most importantly, the brides will want to look beautiful on this special day.

Top 10 things to plan

Venue

There are many places to hold ones special day in Malaysia. You will be spoilt for choices from the many locations and packages such as beach weddings, highland weddings, garden weddings or even traditional/ ceremonial weddings. Even for venues save from the clutches of the weather you could choose from hosting it on a yacht, in a penthouse/ suite in a luxurious hotels/ resorts or even in a ferries wheel in Titiwangsa. A wedding can be either formal or informal. The more formal the ceremony, the more intricate the planning usually is. Decide early in the process and plan accordingly. Make the reservation early to avoid disappointment. (Important tips: Malaysia is a tropical country. Do take into consideration the time of the year the wedding will be held, especially if it’s an outdoor wedding.) The weather conditions could pose a possible threat to your Big Day. You wouldn’t want your guest to be running for shelter as you are halfway through exchanging your vows! Or to be half-cooked under the scorching sun!

What caterer to pick?

(if the venue does not provide catering services)
Malaysia is multi-racial country, so let your taste buds run wild with the extensive selection of local cuisine. From delicious starters to desserts, you can savour from a variety of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Peranakan, Western, Fusion and the lists goes on. Whether you opt for a cocktail reception, a buffet or a sit down 8 to 10 course banquet dinner, it all depends on your budget and the number of guests you are inviting.

Wedding invitations

Planning the guest lists can be very challenging and stressful if you do not have a head start. With our Asian culture, the guest lists run into thousands because the parents and parents-in-law want to invite the whole town to the wedding. Once you’ve finalised on the venue, take into consideration the capacity of the place and the number of guests it can accommodate. It can be a very sensitive topic to decide who’s invited and who’s not. If you have too big a crowd, you might want to consider two sittings, one for a cocktail or buffet luncheon after the wedding ceremony and probably the other for the dinner reception. Remember to send out the invitations early and include a map to prevent guests from getting lost.

Flowers and décor

The thought of being surrounded by a garden of flowers sounds heavenly. If you are faced with budget realities do consider domestically grown flowers or rent potted plants from your local nurseries. To create your wedding theme, you could incorporate ribbons, laces, beads, balloons, candles, streamers or even sea-shells. All you need is a little imagination and a touch of faith! We’re talking about do-it yourself decorations. Rope in your families and friends to help. Get your decorations done the day before the wedding so you don’t have any 11th hour stress.

Wedding songs & music

Music sets the mood of your wedding style and the coming celebration. There are several key pieces of the ceremony and reception that call for musical accompaniment. Research and find the perfect song for every moment of your wedding and make sure it’s appropriate. You certainly don’t want to kill the mood with a mismatch of music to the ceremony. Don’t ever allow a bad choice of music to spoil the ambiance that you’ve spent so much time to create.

Bridal wear/ Evening wear

A wedding gown can be rented or bought off the rack from bridal shops. If budget permits, nothing is more pleasurable than having the most important dress in your life especially custom-made by a fashion designer. Before you choose the silhouette of your gown, you need to know yourself first. No doubt the silhouette sets the mood of your gown but you have to look good in it. Don’t feel obliged to sign on a package on the spot with the bridal studio just because you’ve tried on their gowns. The rule of thumb is to shop around so you can compare other bridal packages and not regret later.

Make-up artist / Hair Stylist

Finding the right professional makeup artist can be time-consuming, and the services costly. It’s good to fix an appointment for consultation to test your hairdo and makeup before the wedding takes place. You do not want to wait until the morning of the event to decide how you want to look. A consultation will give you time to try out different looks before deciding on your favorite, as well as match your hairstyle to your veil. You can bring along printouts of hairstyles and makeup looks that appeal to you, so your stylist has some direction. If you’re not completely in love with the way you look, return for another consultation until you get it right.

Photographer / Videography

Decide how important your wedding pictures and video are to you, and budget accordingly. You would want to capture all the beautiful and special moments on that special day and make the memories last long after the Big Day. Photography packages can vary greatly depending on the photographer skills and experience so shop around to find a quality photographer who is within your budget. It’s important to interview the photographers and look at their portfolio to ascertain the style that you want.

Live band / Emcee / Entertainer

A live band adds a touch of class and can liven up the crowd and send an upbeat vibe. If you have specific songs that you want to hear on your wedding day, be sure to make your requests known beforehand. Sit down with your band and explain the style of your wedding, your ideal genre, and any specific songs that you want played.

Wedding favours / Thank you gifts

Giving your guests a memento, or favour, on your wedding day has been a long-standing custom. It’s a gesture to thank them for sharing the special occasion. There are a variety of favours in the market. However if you would like to make your own, you can get the materials from your local art and craft shops.

After the romantic wedding proposal and being in cloud nine for weeks, my hubby-to-be and I decided to start with our wedding plans. We gave ourselves a year to prepare. Location was the utmost decision and we narrowed down to a few venues. In Johor Bahru, bookings are made at least one year in advance as most excited couples do not want their once in a lifetime event to be held in a unimpressive venue. Every bride wants her wedding to be the talk of the town and for the months to come.

Especially so if you want a memorable or auspicious date, please ensure you book early or you’ll be disappointed you’ll have to settle for second or worst of all, a venue that is not even your choice. With our Asian heritage, the guest list can range from hundreds to thousands of guests.

The theme is also a main criteria before deciding the venue for the wedding. Some couples may just want to hold the wedding dinner whilst others may decide to incorporate both the wedding ceremony and wedding dinner at the same venue.

Well, we’ve always wanted a romantic garden wedding and we set our hearts out to look for the best location in Johor Bahru. We had a few places in mind and after taking into consideration the logistics and accommodation for the guests, we had our hearts set on Pulai Springs Resort. The golf resort is located within a natural setting of flora and fauna and it simply captivated our heart. The straight road leading into the resort is flanked by overgrown, majestic looking raintrees and as you drive into the resort, you get the feeling of nature’s goodness and a relaxing destination that is to come. It’s simply like a picture out of a postcard.

When we had our wedding there a year ago, they had just erected a marquee hall. The marquee hall is a tent like structure with a glass façade. The interior is carpeted and has a billowing ceiling top. We were happy that the marquee hall was big enough to hold all of our 700 guests.

Outside the marquee hall, there is a timber flooring extension that overlooks the golf course. By utilising the extended space, we were able to sit 100 guests thereat as we conducted our wedding ceremony. With the overhanging tree branches shielding the seated guests from the sun, it was a perfect garden setting for a wedding solemnisation ceremony. As we exchanged our wedding vows and rings, the guests could not help but to marvel at the loving couple as they kissed in front of the backdrop of a lush golf course resplendent with rolling greens and undulating hills.

After the confetti had settled on the floor, everyone adjourned to the nearby hall for cocktails. After which, the sun had begun to set and the guests made their way to the marquee hall for a night of celebration.

Having a good venue coordinator is the utmost importance. This person can either make or break your wedding. We were fortunate that Pulai Springs Resort had a capable officer who attended to all our whims and fancies.

Drawing a list of to-dos was the first priority. The list is endless but the main items include the decorations, table settings, air-conditioner temperature, food testing, lighting, sound system and etc.

Always negotiate for freebies with the venue coordinator. Anything you can save certainly helps your budget. We were fortunate to negotiate for free floral decorations and luxurious table/chair settings in this instance. We were lucky that the colours of the decorations were in line with our theme too.

In keeping up with the romantic theme, we ensured that the lighting and air temperature were conducive enough to set the mood.

As we had also hired a band for the wedding dinner, we had to ensure that the sound system was good enough and there was enough space for the musicians to do their work.
Since the dinner ended with dancing, we also made sure that there was enough space near the band for the guests to boogie the night away.

As the wedding date approaches, there will always be additional things that may be added/required at the wedding. It’s always good to talk things over with the venue coordinator and reach a compromise if necessary. This is especially so if the venue lacks certain equipment or facility to cater to your needs.

All in all, I dare say my wedding venue was the best I’ve seen in Johor Bahru. It was the perfect venue of my dreams and I’m sure all the guests certainly agreed.