Wedding Showcase: Our Wedding!

We've been thinking about adding a new segment to add to our wedding blog. These posts will be called 'Wedding Showcase' where you can see photos from real weddings! Full of questions and answers of course! For our first 'Wedding Showcase,' we will look back on our own wedding and relive all the lovely memories we shared when we got married. Hope you enjoy it!  

John Li Photography

Bride: Tracie Fong
Groom: Daniel Kim
Occupation: Graphic Designer / Executive Director of Chambers of Commerce
Date of Wedding: September 19, 2009
Location: Pasadena, CA
Photographer: John Li Photographer

Favorite Romantic Comedy/Wedding Movie: Father of the Bride

Inspiration for your Wedding? We took inspiration from everywhere, from television, movies, magazines, online and of course: Martha Stewart. We each had one goal for our wedding. Daniel’s goal was to create a unique wedding of which our guests could witness something new and different.  Everything we designed for our wedding had to be personalized for our own tastes. My goal in our wedding was to create a handmade wedding. In the end many guests had no clue that we crafted mostly every wedding project. We saved our dollars creating on hand making our decorations and invitations, which meant we could stretch our dollar on different parts of our wedding, for example: getting the location we really wanted and etc.

What Color Scheme where you trying to achieve? Our overall wedding colors were a black and white, with pink accents. Overall I think we achieved what we wanted to create. We wanted to have a classic black and white wedding, offset with a shell pink accents with a modern flair.

Any DIY projects, you loved the most? We hand crafted oh so many things! In fact that I think I was quite compulsive. Once I finished a craft project I immediately thought of a new project for the wedding. From designing our own invitations, making pink glitter candles, lace lanterns and scatter flowers for our reception tables, I must say I definitely had an illness. We also crafted ceremony program fans, our own candy bar (serving an monochromatic pink variety of salt water taffy!), spray painted 99¢ frames with a hi-gloss white paint (for photos and Table Menus), and made our own ring pillow for our puppy (the ring bearer). 

For our wedding décor my favorite item we created has to be our escort cards. Each card had to be double duty; listing the name of each guest and what each guest requested to eat for their entrée. What were the choices? (Beef, chicken and fish). Instead of hiding this detail, I decided to have a little fun with it and instead glorified each guest’s choices. We placed large animal icons on each guest’s escort card showing what was on their dinner menu. This added just a little whimsy to the formal wedding, of which I am quite fond. In addition, we had a few kids on our guest list. What was their animal icon? Purple elephants of course!  

My wonderful bridal party and I also made all of our accessories, flowers for our hair and dresses, jewelry, and wedding veil. My favorite bridal accessory would have to be my shoes! I had completely fallen in love with the sapphire blue Manolo Blahniks from the Sex and the City movie (the shoes that Carrie wore when she got married).  However, those beautiful shoes have the hefty price tag of a thousand dollars. Instead, I purchased a more affordable pair of shoes and dyed them a sapphire blue, to achieve a similar look.

Any Bridezilla moments while the planning process? The whole planning process seemed to go well, besides from normal budget and guest list freak out. Most of our Bridezilla and Groomzilla moments happened the day of the wedding. From the speakers for ceremony, not having a protector for the slideshow, to forgetting the sand/vases for the unity ceremony, things seemed like a mess. However, everything worked out in the end! 

Thankfully! .... Well, that's not completely true. I did scream at a innocent parking attendant on the day of my bridal shower, when the parking lot payment kiosk, took away my parking sub along with my parking fee without giving me a receipt. The parking attendant did not believe me and I was running late (I think I scared him a little bit).

Thoughts on the final outcome? We are quite proud of our wedding day. We planned everything ourselves without a wedding planner, which is something that most brides and grooms know how difficult it is to do. We loved our wedding day, every unique part.

Are you glad its over? I have to say: He** YEA! So happy its over! We’ll have decided not to have any regrets and are so very happy on the outcome of our wedding day. We hope we never have to plan a wedding again.