Bridal Gown Preserves

After the honeymoon, you'd think the wedding was over. But, for all new brides, they know that the party ain't over - till you've preserved and stored your gown properly. The Knot has teamed with Prestige Preservation offering brides a convenient way of storing their gowns. They clean it first, of course, then store it in a safe acid-free box.

Unique guest book alternative

You say gesture, I say "Guestures". Ever wondered what are some alternatives to the traditional signing of the guest book? Well, here is one that allows you to frame it, keep it, and display it. At Guestures, you can order a beautiful frame that every guest can sign at the wedding reception. An original idea for the bride looking for something different. Depending on your guest size, they offer different sizes of frames from a 16x20 to a 24x30, and come in either metal, wood, or "premium". For ordering, their website also has a nifty interactive configuration tool that allows you to customize your frame according to font, style, frame type and size.

Cuff Links - Made of Inlaid Abalone

We've all seen the same kind of cufflinks, but every now and then, something unusual comes along. This one was inspired by the mosaic works of Louis Comfort Tiffany - an inlaid abalone and agate cuff link available at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art for $165 (for non-members). FYI - Louis was the son of the founder of Tiffany and Co.

Vintage Veil by Mr. John

During the glamour days of the Hollywood era between the 40s and 60s, if you had a hat or veil made by milliner, Mr. John, it meant that you were a fashionista at large. This beautiful veil, made back in the 50s, has inspiring lace work that features a 3-d floral design. If you want to make statement, and have $3000 to spare, this is the veil for you.

Running of the Brides

Every year since 1947, a ritual at Filene's Basement has been running once a year for the chance to find the best bridal gown bargain. Popularly known as Filene's annual Bridal Gown Sale or the "Running of the Brides," some brides are known to have camped out on the night before the sale - who wouldn't if you can get a drastically marked down gown. If you have ever been to one, you would know that it is not for the faint of heart. As they say, come equipped, come prepared, and come with your bridal battle garb and attitude. And, don't come alone.

Watch the video and you'll see what this is all about : Filene's Basement

Wedding Invitation Sale

What's all the buzz about? A wedding invitation sale at Paper Buzz! Some of their sale items include invitations by Anna Griffin and Caspari. I just don't know when the sale ends (the site didn't say, or I just couldn't find it:)).

Battenberg Cake

Gâteau, gâteau, gâteau! Okay, when you say it three times in a row, the French word for "cake" has a funny ring to it. But putting aside that, who doesn't like cake especially if it's checkered and covered in marzipan icing? Yum's the word! If you haven't seen a Battenberg or Battenburg cake, you've probably seen cakes that have this checkered design. This fancy cake is said to have been named in honor of the marriage of Queen Victoria's granddaugher, Princess Victoria of Hessee-Darmstadt to Prince Louis of Battenberg. Basically, it consists of pink and yellow sponge cake, apricot jam, and marzipan icing. There are several variations of this cake, but the one I've described is at its most basic level:



It's colorful appearance makes it perfect for a sweet afternoon tea party.

If you want to see some delicious pictures, Bron Marshall has some really fab pics.

For recipes:



Better Homes and Gardens

All Recipes

Recipe Goldmine

Gastronomy Domine

Wedding Cupcakes

Call it inspiration from across the Atlantic! These wonderful cupcake arrangements from Cakes 4 Fun in London are just so beautiful. I think their pictures says it all.

Chocolate Mold - for Favors

If you can melt it, you can mold. Chocolate in any form - be it a cake, coin, or any other object you can imagine (I won't mention anything else besides chocolate thongs). But anyways, candy or chocolate molds are a fun way to give out edible favors at a wedding or bridal shower party. They're even a great project for a Saturday afternoon - a snowed out one with the kids, or as a fun craft-oriented shower.

There are many kinds of chocolate molds out there such as:



Make and Mold Wedding Cake Mold from Wrapwithus - at $2.49 per mold. This is a mold that is different from the ones you can make into a lollipop. If you are inspired by those Godiva chocolate cake favors made by cake designer Sylvia Weinstock, then this could be a nice alternative. I can't say though about how it will taste because Godiva chocolate is supremo good. On another note, Make and Mold's website also features some interesting DIY projects.



Purse and Umbrella Chocolate Mold - at $2.19 per mold

They also have the mold for a cake on a lollipop, which seems to be quite popular. There are several kinds of these lollipop molds around the web, that come in different designs.



Bride and Groom on a Lollipop from Candy Mold Central - at $1.89 per mold
They also feature several other kinds of molds in the shape of every bridal thing such as a bell, swan, or champagne glass - to name a few.

Happy Molding!

Topics:

Wedding Chocolate Favors - Truffles

Gown Sale - "Brides Against Breast Cancer"

In a previous post, I mentioned that you could donate your wedding gown to a charity auction. From a gown buyer's perspective, some good news is in the air.



There's an upcoming gown sale called "Brides Against Breast Cancer" in the Baltimore area - sponsored by Mid-Atlantic Curves and the radio station (MIX 106.5). The auction comes in two segments: one on October 19th for a auction preview party wherein tickets run $50 and up. Not bad if you're looking to enjoy some champagne and hors d'oeuvres for a good cause. The next segment runs between October 20-21 at Hilton Baltimore BWI Airport. All proceeds from the sale will benefit the Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation.

Incidentally, there are also other event sales scheduled around the country:



Topics:
Wedding Charity

What to Wear for a Winter Wedding

Visions of snowflakes and icicles bring forth all the surreal beauty of winter - both romantic and glamorous. But wait, it's also really cold, especially if you live anywhere within the midwest and east coast region. How about Chicago or Vermont in December? And let's not forget our Canadian brides, it's cold up there!

A wedding in the winter can certainly be ultra glamourous, but you gotta have the right garb to look fabulous even when it's 20-30 below (brrr!). And hopefully, you don't have to look like the Pillsbury doughboy. So, with that said, the search is on for pretty things to wear with a wedding gown this coming winter.

Here are some of my first finds:



This wonderful ivory faux fur satin shrug - simple with an elegant satin ribbon. There is also a similar one in white. Only problem is that this is from the UK, but this piece from Cornelia James might be available in the US. Some of their products are available in stores such as Neiman Marcus. It's still quite an inspirational piece - perhaps a similar capelet might be lurking around somewhere on the web.



Stylish is the word to describe this white coat from Designer Tuleh. As for the price, still searching for it.



From Bluefly.com, this white wool coat from Via Spiga touts a cashmere and wool blend. So chic! For $399.00, it's worth a look, since white coats that are stylish are so hard to come by.

Topics:
Wedding Dress

Wedding Contests to Join

I rarely win anything, but if there is a chance to join a contest, then why not! You never know when it could be your lucky day.

After searching through the weddingsphere, here are some contests that I stumbled upon - hope to find more:



$5,000 Grand Prize from Mirassou Wines - the contest ends on Dec. 1, 2006



Win a honeymoon vacation from Things Remembered valued at $4,400 - contest runs through March, 2007 (they don't give the exact date). And, if you don't win the grand prize, you can still have a chance to win gift certificates - yay.



From Blue Nile, enter to win a Signature Princess-Cut Diamond - their contest ends on November 30, 2006.

Good luck!

Topics:
Wedding Promotions

Celebrity Wedding Game

US Mag's website has this hilarious game called "Celebrity Wedding Crashers" on guessing the longest celebrity marriages - what a hilarious take.

Topics:
Celebrity Weddings

Barbie Doll Wedding Dress

Bride Barbie® as they are called are a collection of limited edition gowns by such famous designers as Monique Luillier, Carolina Herrera, and Badgley Mischka. For the most serious collector, plunking down a little more than $109 bucks is no big deal for these dolls.



The newest doll from Monique Luillier is supposed to be available this year - touting the ever popular sash design.



As for other special occasions, you can also view Mattel's entire line of dolls all dressed up for weddings, etc. When taking a closer look at what they have done, the level of detail in terms of sewing and embellishing dresses leaves much to be admired.

Topics:
Attire - Ivory Wedding Dresses, Empire Cut Wedding Dresses, Miniature Gowns, Ivory Wedding Dress

Crocheted Jewlery

When you think of crochet, what’s the first thing that enters your mind? Baby bonnets and blankets, eh? Well, times have changed and so has the artistic rendering of crochet. Take the unusual works of Melanie Miguel who has with great dexterity created jewelry by merging her love of needlework with jewelry-making through crochet.



She uses wire threads made of precious metals such as 14k gold or sterling silver.



Her silver crochet necklace is my favorite – you would feel like a princess wearing this piece on your wedding day – it would also be amazing in gold, then you could match it up with that pretty gold bridesmaid dress mentioned in a previous post. Since her creations are all produced by hand, she accepts orders by phone or email. Besides jewelry, Melanie can do some pretty neat things with stone and clay as seen by her sculptures.

Topics:
Jewelry - Platinum Jewelry

W is for Wedding Cookie Invitation

There are invitations that you get in a bottle, there are those you get in a box, or as usual in an envelope (yawn, yawn). But, what if you get one that you can eat? Edible invitation, you say? Aha, got your attention there! Edibles, Inc. makes these wonderful edible invitations, including greeting cards, which are custom-made on a cookie - measures about 5x7. At $15 per cookie, it's not a bad size if you wanna eat it. Just remember to write down the date, time, and venue for the event. Then enjoy it!

Topics:
Edibles - Wedding Photo Cookies

One Gold Bridesmaid Dress You Gotta See

Gown from ©Lazaro



This fall 2006 season, many bridesmaid dress designers have picked the colors: bronze, gold, and orange for their collections. While searching online, this one from Lazaro caught my attention. Even if I weren't becoming a bridesmaid, I'd love to wear this dress - like for a party or fancy dinner date. It' just so simple - yet what is striking is the color and pretty gold sash (which you can also wear on the back instead of on the side of the dress). Although many of their trunk shows were during the summer, Lazaro still has some remaining ones throughout the country for the month of September.

Here is another view of the dress from brides.com:

Gown from ©Brides



I found these show dates from their site:

September 08 - 10, 2006
Bridals By Danielle - Philadelphia, PA
215-670-9500

September 15 - 16, 2006
Jobyna's - Glendale, CA
818-248-0026

September 21 - 23, 2006
Julian Gold - San Antonio, TX
210-824-2493

September 28 - 30, 2006
Here Comes the Bride - San Diego, CA
619-688-9201

One Custom-Made Dress, Pls. - Online

In the age of RTW (ready to wear) dresses, a custom-made dress is not something we normally think of when planning the attire of your bridesmaids. Enter Coco Myles and you’ve got custom couture made easy for the today’s tech savvy bride. It’s so much fun to use their site – choose your style, experiment with colors and fabrics, match it with a shawl, add on beadwork, and even choose a sash color. Though a little limited, you can currently choose from 6 different styles of skirts and tops and their sizes range from 2 to 32.

*** Do note: they don’t mention if they carry petite sizes.

Here is the dress I ended up picking:

Weddings for a Cause

While spending enormous amounts of money to have the perfect wedding is becoming more of a fact these days, there is always a way to make a lavish and extravagant wedding, one that is both memorable and yet charitable. Not to say that we should start having charity weddings, but there are some ways to put the money spent on a wedding towards a good cause.

Here are some of my ideas - I know that not every bride or groom will agree with them, but here they are:

1) Instead of storing your gown, you can donate your gown to a charitable auction such as one for breast cancer. The same can be said if the groom had bought his tuxedo. You may want to check this website:

Charity Folks has teamed with the Knot for a wedding dress auction

2) Have the flowers from the reception brought to a nursing home.

3) Have your guests give donations to a charity through a registry of your choosing:

I Do Foundation

Just Give

4) For guest favors, make a donation to your favorite charity and let guests know by enclosing a small piece of candy together with your donation card's message.

5) If your wedding has any leftover food, have them given to a homeless shelter.

Japanese Wedding Site

As we all know, there are dozens of wedding planning sites around the US, but today, I decided to look at what’s going on outside our wonderful country by taking a trip (ahem, a virtual one) to Japan. And if you cannot understand words of a foreign language, it’s a good thing that there are still pictures to go by.
For this “trip”, I stumbled upon this site called Zexy – in what appears to be a Japanese wedding site similar to brides.com or knot.com.



I enjoyed getting around the site by just clicking on the site's graphical metaphors . It's a good thing they have those buttons with metaphors. Now I know how it feels to be a foreigner in another country who could only get around by pointing at pictures.

Here are some of the pages I visited:

Destination Weddings



They feature some pretty interesting destination wedding resorts. Each resort provides detailed information with several pictures of the place that you can view in an enlarged format. Be sure to check this place with some spectacular views.


Dress Fashions



Since this visit is one based purely on the visual, I must say that their Flash presentation of various wedding dresses is a treat. When you land on this page, put your mouse on each model and a new picture comes up of the model wherein you can view the gowns from different angles.

Jewelry



The wedding ring section features some very cool flash videos of each vendor. To view each vendor, click on the pictures under the section called Special Report. When you click on a new link, a window pops up offering virtual tours of each store and a showcase of their collections.

Wedding Flowers



I found it most intriguing when I saw this picture of a bouquet that really looks like a flower ball – pretty neat-looking pomander. It's the first picture on the top right of the page.



Some additional sites that I found recently:

Wedding Expert

Wedding Net

Wedding Park

Wedding TV

When you were younger, were you ever told that you watch too much TV? Well, that was then – that was before the age of web video! And with so much new stuff coming up on the web, here are a couple of online video sites to check out:



The Knot TV Live
Features fashion runway shows, beauty, shopping, and honeymoon reports. What I like most are the clips showing the collections of wedding dress designers through the Knot TV on Demand. They have a nice schedule of videos posted on their site, as well.



Wedding Channel TV
Features mainly wedding fashion videos, but also includes other components of wedding planning such as how to choose the right kitchen appliances (yeah, some people need help with that).




YouTube
Great for all you wedding voyeurs! There are loads of real weddings that you can watch. Wonderful to watch on a labor day weekend!



Google Video
Google’s new video search is another great way to check out other weddings from people kind enough to post their video on the web. Also recommended for wedding voyeurs.

Weddings Mags in Digital Format

If you're like me, there's nothing better than having a nice magazine to read on a relaxing Sunday afternoon. Multiply that by 12 months though, and you've got a whole lot of magazines probably stacked up at home. Lately, I came across a free trial subscription from Zinio - a digital magazine subscription service. By downloading their reader, it seems that you can view an entire magazine on a pc, laptop, or notebook tablet.

Whether it's a business or bridal mag, it would certainly be great to have this considering that some magazines can get pretty darn thick and enough trees are getting axed. Why not use technology to simplify things, right? Evidently, their collection titles are growing and now Zinio's offers Destination Weddings & Honeymoons' mag, too.

Wedding Cakes you can Carry

They're are normally meant to be eaten, but what if you had a purse that was the shape of a wedding cake. These lovely cake shaped bags from Gioia Handbags are sure to make you wanna eat cake! Of course, icing and flavor - not included.

The end of the 24 hour hitching post

Perhaps it’s the sign of the times, or just a sign that the Vegas Marriage License Bureau is cutting back on hours (i.e., costs amounting to about $200K). But anyways, spontaneous acts of matrimony shall soon come to a disappointing end for many – at least on a 24-hour basis. Does waiting for another 6-8 hours really matter from the time a proposal is made till the vows are exchanged? Maybe for some it does matter.

Whilst getting married during the wee hours of the night and often morning will no longer be available, waiting a bit longer might actually be a good thing for those who may be rushing into marriage a little bit too quickly. Maybe this delay might actually result in more planned weddings as opposed to saying “I do” right away. And in Vegas, it might be an opportunity to weigh in more of the experience of having a wedding there besides just getting hitched – unless this is your thing and spontaneity is tied to romance - not that I recommend one in Vegas, but yet some dig it. And if you do, here is a neat guide to "Las Vegas Weddings."

**Incidentally, there is a place in Coeur D' Alene, Idaho called The Hitching Post Wedding Chapel.

Color - it's not all the same

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but what about color? Say, no more for the guys at the Pantone Institute have created this ingenious product that calibrates your computer monitor to the correct color. Since virtually every monitor renders color differently, this device takes care of the problem. So, when you bought something online and the color blue, which you thought was a light crystal blue turned out to be darker than usual - then you need the
PANTONE® Eye-One Display LT. At a cost of about $169.00, it's worth it if you surf and shop frequently online.

Miniatures - All Dress Up

Call it haute couture, but mini haute couture to be more exact. After WWII, miniature dolls dressed in the most extravangant outfits seem to be all the craze as Parisian couteriers seemed to have a fancy for putting their creations into minis. Their work is so striking in detail that it is worth looking at. The Museum of History and Industry in Seattle is hosting an exhibit called Théâtre de la Mode. This same exhibition featured the same dolls (kept and cared for permanently at the Maryhill Museum of Art) that were used back in 1945 - when they first debut at the Louvre. Because these were miniatures, fashion designers from Nina Ricci to Balenciaga embellished these gowns as if they were as real as their life size version such as their bridal gowns that actually had a floor length train. By miniaturizing the dolls, artists were able to capture the detail in greater level simply and much out of necessity because the lack of materials after the war made it challenge to create run-way ready dresses, so they made them the size of dolls. Of course, if you can't head out to Seattle, then you can at least order the book entitled "Théâtre de la Mode: Fashion Dolls: The Survival of Haute Couture" about the exhibition from Amazon, order it from your local bookstore, or borrow it(if you're lucky) from your library.

Lavish Weddings on The Rise?

While this article was written more than 3 years ago, the viewpoints on weddings are intriguing. It cites that extravagant weddings are on the rise, but I think that they have always been this way. It's just that they are getting more attention nowadays because of influences of high profile figures (i.e., celebrity weddings). Incidentally, this article was a prelude to a book called "Cinderella Dreams."

Ivory wedding dress - the forgotten color

Ivory - the other color, the unpopular yet mysterious sister of white, and the color for the bride who wants to be different, but of course, just as elegant. White wedding gowns seem to be the de rigeur for wedding gowns in every fashion mag - both online and offline. Perfect bodied models can be sautering down the runway in every white gown imaginable. However, when you do see a one wearing an ivory gown, something different just happens. Your eyes just seem to gaze a bit longer and soon you'll notice that ivory is indeed a color for the bride who wants to be unique. ** Since finding an ivory bridal gown can be somewhat of a challenge, it will be my goal to build a list of ivory dresses found on the web.

I'm starting out with these:

Priscilla of Boston - Platinum Gown Collection has a strapless lace embroidered gown.



A Silk Taffeta gown with strapless and ballgown design from Jim Helm. There is another one with an A-line design and an embroidered bodice that is just as nice.