California Reception Decor Sneak Peak

Reception in California went really well and the weather turned out great, with no rain as I had hoped.  The decorations I spent hours putting together turned out exactly the way I’ve envisioned and I can’t wait to see the professional pictures of the details once it’s sent to me. I enjoyed the overall planning process and I feel lucky that I’ve had the chance to experience both wonderful wedding customs in both worlds.  I feel blessed to have had wonderful friends, family and my two dogs celebrate this special day with us. 🙂 More details to be updated later!

Here are some pictures that my baby cousin took with my 5dmarkIII (prof pics to come later):

Cupcake Liners

[edited 4/5/2013]

I love how my cupcakes turned out! here are few of the professional pictures:

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Because I love seeing cute dessert tables at weddings and parties, I’ve also decided to incorporate one for my guests. Other than the pink chocolate and candy goodies I’ve ordered online, cupcakes will be main attraction. My semi-planner responsible for the dessert table will have the cupcakes displayed on the cupcake tower (picture to follow after the reception!), and because I’ll be having a separate 4-tiered cake in gold on a round table with its own special linen it’ll not be part of the dessert table.

I’ve looked everywhere in orange county for places that made unique and pretty cupcakes and the venue my friend used for her wedding was the most fancy of the bunch. 🙂 Because I’m a huge fan of red velvet cupcakes, all of the cupcakes will be red velvet with pink frosting with 7 different decorations (few on the bottom picture, but imagine this in PINK). A pic from my cupcake tasting:

They also only offer dark brown cupcake liners so I thought I’d be creative and make it a bit more fancy. It does add extra costs to the cupcakes so I’ve limited my order number to 60.  I’ve always thought lace around cupcakes were just gorgeous, so I’ve dug around the arts and craft store and found this lace and liner which complements one other so nicely. (I had to provide them with the liner, lace, AND extra labor costs of $1.00/cupcake. Annoyed that I don’t have time to do this myself, because I love DIY projects).

Which is prettier? I decided to incorporate “rustic distressed white” elements to my wedding so I’m not sure if the fancy gold would still really match with the overall theme, but it does really stand out here.

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. 🙂

Our Korean Wedding Invitations Are Here!

They’ve arrived! David picked them up on the way when he came back to the states from Singapore > Korea > California. It’s a lot more cuter in person and I love the invitation wording that we’ve chosen… it took us days to edit and finalize our quote. I had no idea this is how it worked with Korean invitations but as you can see, the bows and invitation cards arrive separately and we have to individually make them one by one. I like it that the bows come tied though, so it looks as if it’s professionally done.

Here’s what’s written since the bow is blocking the wording:

사람들에게 행복을 주는 그 사람을 만났습니다.
웃는 모습이 너무나 예쁜 그 사람을 만났습니다.
그 인연에 이끌려 이제 영원을 함께 약속하려 합니다.
아름다운 사랑으로 날개를 펴는 저희에게
축복과 격려 부탁드립니다.

🙂 We’ve fixed and edited because we didn’t want a cliche passage. Make sure to send your invitations out one month before your wedding date!

Click here for previous post on how I chose my invitations.

Ordering Korean Wedding Invitations

Hi all! It took me soo long to find THE Korean invitation I liked that I’m almost dreading even writing about it, but thought I’d share some of the great sites I’ve came across in my search. I don’t know if it’s because I’m super picky or because my sense of taste is just so different than what is sought after in Asia, but it was only after months and months of searching that I came across one I was content with. My cousin in Korea is in the biz card industry so he was also able to refer me to great card sites… but beware and be warned! some of them are super corny and a lot of English phrases listed just don’t make sense… that it makes my fingers cringe bc I’m so embarrassed for them lol. If they’re going to sell a product to public, I’d think that the proper thing to do would be to have it be proofread first by an English-speaking person. I should be used to it now: I grew up purchasing Morning Glory products, a Korean stationery brand that sells cute character-branded pencils, notebooks, etc., that had horrible formations of English words on it as “decor” that made you go “huh?!” every time you attempted to even read the thing. But this was years ago. And that was a mere pencil or notebook, and this is a once in a life time wedding card. So don’t say I didn’t warn you! Look carefully to see if they’ve added any English (most of them did) and make sure the phrases make sense. So here you go, I’ve listed below some of the most popular Korean sites for wedding invitations:

Bargain invitations that are still cute:

바른손카드 – http://www.barunsoncard.com
그린애플카드 – http://www.greenapplecard.net

Fun invitations/ Photo invitations:

카드큐 – http://www.cardq.co.kr/

Luxury invitations:

투비캄원 – http://www.2become1.co.kr/
예랑 – http://www.yerang.com/

Korean-made American-style invitation in English (by Gloria):

http://www.bweddinginvitations.com/

TIP: For those who visit Korea frequently, buy your invitations in Korea (unless you want to splurge on the most classiest of classy wedding invitations with paid calligrapher which will not be found here). The same quality papers are MUCH cheaper than in America and styles are as cute or cuter if you really dig. (paper and printing is cheaper in Korea) For instance, Korea’s invitations on average ranges from $0.30~3.00 per, while american ones range from $3.00~10.00 (for good quality ones). Make sure you look throughly because a lot of them look really cheap and plain.. but if you dig through, you’ll find a few that’s both decent in quality and price. I believe invitations are the introduction and face to your wedding so it was very important to me that our invitation be classy and in high-quality, but I didn’t want to over splurge and spend $6.50/per card quoted by a few American wedding planners.

To find a decent invitation in Korea, you really have to be patient and flexible. I preferred the American postcard type of invitations, but Korean invitations are mostly “cards” that fold so I had to keep searching around. I also wanted bows in tiffany mint color to match my color theme, but I ultimately went with a pink one because I liked the overall design, and because it was so affordable.  I added in the full option which comes with high quality ink that sort of pops up a bit, giving it a 3-D look. After searching all those sites above, here’s the one I chose from barunsoncard:

Here’s the Tiffany colored one by Yerang that Korean actress Shinae (신애) did for her wedding. This was on my top choice because it’s cuter in my opinion (love the long rectangular shape), but the price for the pink invitations were too good to pass up! This is $3.00 (but not expensive at all compared to America’s) and my pink one was only $0.80 cents. Yup, $0.80 cents!

Keep in mind though that while Americans on average invite 80~200 guests to their wedding, Koreans invite 300~600. I guess they’d have to make the invitation prices low in Korea or else everyone would be paying $1000+ for them. The paper is THICK and if you ask, most of the fonts and sentences written can be changed to suit your wedding. If you live in Korea, you can order a sample for free and actually feel it in person, or visit the actual store itself.

I highly recommend Yerang to the brides who are looking for card with the luxurious feel. But Baruonson card was my ultimate choice bc of its as-great quality and its justifiable price!

Note: the sites are nearly impossible to navigate if you can’t read even a little bit of Korean, have your mom, cousin, relative, whoever help you! Also, if you are a foreigner, you will NOT be able to purchase from the site directly. email them and the representatives are very helpful, they will guide you through the process.