Ah, memories...

Happy Friday, everybody! This is an almost non-business related post. It's a little break from all the letterpress I've been doing! I work with so many brides and grooms that I thought I would post share some photos from my own wedding. Most of the pictures were taken by Chris Schmitt of Chris Schmitt Photography here in Los Angeles (yes, he flew to Hawaii) with the exception of two on the bottom which was taken by my good friend Jeff, who is also an awesome photographer.

The wedding was over two years ago in Hawaii, where I'm from. We got married at Luana Hills Country Club near my parents' house, which is a simply gorgeous location nestled up against the Ko'olaus on Oahu. We had a pretty strict budget, but we wanted to make sure that our guests who had flown all the way to Hawaii were going to have a good time at the wedding. We got little boxes of Hawaiian Host chocolate covered macadamia nuts as favors directly from Hawaiian Host and wrapped them in green with a silk orchid on top.

A couple things I was pretty adamant about -- I did not want to walk in to Wagner's Wedding Song. And I wanted Chinese lion dancers. They're good luck and a lot of fun! My dad's coworker was in a lion dancing association which made it easy (and affordable), and I hired a local entertainment company to sing during the ceremony and provide dinner entertainment. I walked in to the Hawaiian Wedding Song and walked out to Tiny Bubbles -- as people blew thousands of little bubbles. It was a fabulous and gorgeous sight! We were married by Rev. Frank Mak - I loved everything about him and would recommend him to anybody getting married in Hawaii.

At the reception, I changed into a red ballgown for our first dance. As much I loved my gown (it was a Provonias gown fitted by Loyce at Sharazi), it's customary for the bride to change several times in my culture and my gorgeous wedding dress had a cathedral train that would have impeded our waltz. We danced to Moon River, one of my favorite songs. I then changed into a traditional Vietnamese ao dai for awhile. Joel's aunt danced a hula for us, and then we had a polynesian revue to entertain guests. I wanted to have our cake pictures in the white dress, so I changed back after dinner. We had a gorgeous and whimsical creation by Cake Lava that had everyone talking - and tasty, too! We had a really gorgeous wedding video, too, that everyone loved, but I have no idea what happened to the videographer.

My makeup was done by the ever sweet Dorys Foltin, and the hair and makeup was still intact at the end of the night.

If you can believe it, thanks to some really great deals, we stayed within our budget of $22,000, including buying the bridesmaid dresses and groomsmen suits for our wedding party.

Thank you to all friends and family (AGAIN!) who helped make the wedding so so wonderful. My mom's friend who owns a lei shop in Chinatown did all the flowers, our family friend altered the bridesmaid dresses and made the ties for the groomsmen, my sister bought bottles of moscato d'asti for all the tables at the wedding, my brother, mother, and grandmothers-in-law helped wrapped the favors, Brie (event planner extraordinaire) was event coordinator for the day, Heather gave us beautiful Tiffany toasting flutes for the wedding, and the list goes on and on and on.

Hope you enjoyed my wedding!