Must have flower fillers

Gotta love California! 😀

One of many great things about America that Asian countries lack is its variety of beautiful flowers.  There are so many different types of flowers available here that will well complement any type of wedding settings/themes. I had such a hard time finding the right flowers in Korea for my Korean wedding that I’m having a great time picking and choosing all sorts of flowers for my American reception.  (My korean wedding flowers turned out so beautiful thanks to my florist and coordinator! click here for pictures).

Few of my favorite flowers are peonies and garden roses.  While looking at what other flowers or fillers that will best match these two for my American reception, I came across Dusty miller and Brunia Nodiflora Silver that totally caught my eye. I’ve always thought that they were beautiful and eyed them for my wedding reception but never knew their names. They are also cheap in price, so it’s a great “filler” to have for your flower centerpiece and bouquet!

Brunia Nodiflora Silver:

Dusty Miller (very cheap):

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The type of color palette I’m hoping to create for my gold/light pink reception (with Brunia Nodiflora Silver, dusty millers, garden roses, roses, and hydrangea). They’re totally different than the type and color of flowers I had for my korean wedding.

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[edit 4/6/2013]

Here’s how my bridemaids’ and my bouquet turned out. I loved the soft color palette and most of all, the affordable pricing! Most flowers are a lot cheaper during winter season than in summer.

Post Wedding Rambles Pt. 2

I was organizing all my wedding-related pictures today on my computer and saving them to my portable hard drive (soo many pictures!) and I thought I should upload a few more that I found. It’s actually the ones my sister took with my Canon 5D Mark III.  Here are few pictures of the decor:

1. Our photo table. In korea, there are event planners that come and decorate your photo table for around $200~300.  I really considered using them because well decorated photo tables really make your venue pop, with beautiful album frames, cakes, boxes, and other wedding lovey-dovey stuff that you normally wouldn’t buy yourself provided and decorated for you.  But I decided to just go with what I had because of lack of time in finding the right planner. I’m so glad I didn’t, because it ended up looking just fine and the gorgeous album frames and letters my mom bought from America really stood out. We also hung the date banner we made for our engagement shoot in America.

2. 화환. I’m not sure why this custom exists in Korea, but friends of my and my husband’s family as well as our relatives give this to be displayed at our wedding venue. It supposedly displays our families’ companies in Korea and my dad’s friends hospitals.

3. Wedding Ice Sculpture. Not sure who gave this to us, but we also had a wedding ice sculpture. (We didn’t notice until the pictures)

4. Finger foods. There weren’t many finger food pictures sadly but here’s little of what my sister captured.

and…. a teaser pic. 🙂

Choosing the Venue: Korea (Part 3)

Our final venue of choice is Ritz Carlton 🙂

We pondered between Ritz and Shilla for a week or so, because we couldn’t let go of the thought of being wed @ Shilla’s beautiful traditional 영빈관 (Youngbingwan: Korean castle). But I really didn’t like that the main ceremony hall, separate from the reception area, was so small in size and would not have the heightened walkway + high ceiling that I looked for in hotel weddings. So Ritz Carlton it was, and here are the reasons why it made #1 on our list:

1. Main ballroom is not as big as Hyatt or Shilla’s Dynasty Ballroom, and fits maximum 350 people. FIY: if you have high number of guests, which is pretty common in Korea, the rest of the guests would sit OUTSIDE the ballroom as a “opera” type wedding where they get projections of your wedding.  I thought this was pretty rude for the guests because the area seems a bit secluded, so I’m curious as to why anyone holds it here when they have bigger guest count. It looks something like this: