Disney Packaged Wedding?

DC Nearlyweds discuss the new Disney wedding package. 

So Disney’s latest venture into the wedding market is a collaboration with celebrity event planner David Tutera. Here’s how it works- you pay Disney $45,000 and you get to choose from 4 pre-designed “couture” wedding receptions designed by David Tutera. You can see pictures of the 4 different styles here or watch videos of the styles here (you can also see a peek of the styles below).

What does $45,000 get you? A reception for 50 people (more people = more money) at Disney Contemporary Resort which includes ballroom, draping, table linens, chivari chairs, props (chandeliers, mirrors), floral centerpieces, lighting, D.J., dance floor, invitations, save the dates, wedding website, and a David Tutera trained planner.

The pictures are lovely, and the idea of a Disney wedding is so fairy-tale! But there’s one problem…

 …the receptions are not customizable. Nothing can be changed. They can’t do your colors, or use the flowers you love, or put your monogram on anything. You can’t change the design of your invitations. You can’t change the location. You can’t even mix and match from their 4 different styles.

Would you do it? I’m on the fence here… I wouldn’t like this for my own big day because I feel like you’re paying for things you may not want or need at your wedding.  But I would LOVE to be a guest at a Disney wedding!

Disney Packaged Wedding?

DC Nearlyweds discuss the new Disney wedding package. 

So Disney’s latest venture into the wedding market is a collaboration with celebrity event planner David Tutera. Here’s how it works- you pay Disney $45,000 and you get to choose from 4 pre-designed “couture” wedding receptions designed by David Tutera. You can see pictures of the 4 different styles here or watch videos of the styles here (you can also see a peek of the styles below).

What does $45,000 get you? A reception for 50 people (more people = more money) at Disney Contemporary Resort which includes ballroom, draping, table linens, chivari chairs, props (chandeliers, mirrors), floral centerpieces, lighting, D.J., dance floor, invitations, save the dates, wedding website, and a David Tutera trained planner.

The pictures are lovely, and the idea of a Disney wedding is so fairy-tale! But there’s one problem…

 …the receptions are not customizable. Nothing can be changed. They can’t do your colors, or use the flowers you love, or put your monogram on anything. You can’t change the design of your invitations. You can’t change the location. You can’t even mix and match from their 4 different styles.

Would you do it? I’m on the fence here… I wouldn’t like this for my own big day because I feel like you’re paying for things you may not want or need at your wedding.  But I would LOVE to be a guest at a Disney wedding!

What Will The Bridesmaids Wear?

Most brides know one thing from the start of their wedding planning and that is what colors her theme will be. Most weddings have the bridesmaids wear the same dress in the same color. It’s a really great look as long as the girls dresses have the same basic neckline as the bride.

The problem with the above is that sometimes your bridesmaids are shaped a little different from one another and have different tastes. When you get to the dress shop each girl is looking for something that she likes and that flatters her. This is not an easy task to get them all to compromise and can result in a lot of stress. Don’t fear! There are a couple ways to avoid this whole situation.

The first is that each girl can choose a different dress. The important thing here is that they must be the exact same color and basic same season. This means little differences are great, massive differences are out.

The other method that I devised for my wedding was I gathered bridal magazines and I picked out six dresses that I really liked. I cut them out, put them on cardboard and asked each of my girls to write down the order of their favorites from one to six. I also asked them to tell me if there were any that they would absolutely not want to wear. If they selected something they wouldn’t wear I immediately took that dress off the list for everyone. With number one being the favorite and six being the least liked, I came out with one style they had all picked at least third on all the lists. That’s the dress they wore.

Some brides like to have rainbow weddings where each girl wears a different color. This is especially beautiful in spring or summer weddings where the colors are pastel. Another variation of this is to have the wear different shades of the same color. I liked pink and purple for my wedding so I had maid of honor wear dark pink, two girls wear light pink, two girls wore dark purple and two wore light purple. They looked fantastic!

A Couple Cool Flower Ideas

If you’re looking for a great way to make your wedding a little different and memorable try one of these ideas for your flowers.

Most brides carry bouquets these days, but there was a time when girls carried flowers on lace fans, lace parasols, and candles. This idea grew from that tradition. Get a small purse and cover it with the flowers you wish to carry. This not only gives your flowers a new look, but you also get to carry your  purse with you where you can keep your lipstick,id’s, and other small essentials you might need!

The next flower idea involves your throw away bouquet. I know in movies and in some circles the tradition is for the bride to throw her actual wedding bouquet, but here in the Midwest brides don’t want to part with that. They have a second smaller bouquet made up for throwing during the reception. A fun way to treat the second throw away bouquet is to gather up individual flowers with long stems and tie a big bow to only one of the flowers. Without anyone seeing gather up and hold the flowers together as if they were connected to one another. Throw as usual and what will happen is the flowers will scatter and enable multiple girls to catch them. As for the tradition of who will be married next, the girl who catches the one with the bow of course!

Wedding Cake Glossary

Ever since I said that cake isn’t be a priority for me, I’ve been looking at bakery ads or visiting wedding cake websites “just to look”. Oh, the power of suggestion…

Anyway, Jennifer Baumann of Wedding Gazette.com has compiled a dictionary of wedding cake terms. “Do you want fondant, royal, or buttercream? Will it have dragees, marzipan, or ganache?” she begins. I knew that those pretty Christmas fruit decorations are made of marzipan, but the rest of the dictionary was new to me. Now I have even more wedding options to daydream about! I think my favorite is still the basic buttercream.

Buttercream:

The traditional icing served on every store-bought birthday cake you’ve ever had. It’s rich and creamy and is easily colored or flavored, and is used for fancy decorations like shells, swags, basketweaves, icing flowers, etc. Since it’s made almost entirely of butter (hence the name), buttercream has a tendency to melt in extreme heat, so it’s not recommended for outdoor weddings.

Wedding Budget Guide

This wedding budget guide on Confetti has some helpful advice to save money on your wedding.

It may not be very romantic, but the issue of who’s paying for what is one of the first things that needs to be established when you plan your wedding.

Traditionally, it falls to the father of the bride to pick up the tab for the main event, with the groom chipping in for the church or registry fees and the all-important honeymoon. But times are changing fast. Today, more couples choose to pay for the bulk of their wedding themselves, or costs may even be split between the couple and the two sets of parents.

The site offers good ideas to save money on food (contact a catering college and look for students) and decorations (you or a crafty friend can do your own flowers), and on wedding favors and centerpieces.

Make your own favours. Try budget alternatives like:

Love Heart sweets in a favour box

A bowl of sweets in the centre of the table

A personalized chocolate placed on each napkin

Individual candles

Mini crackers

A heart-shaped sparkler on each guest’s napkin

An engraved shot glass, with either the bride and groom’s name or the guest’s

A simple favour box or bag filled with Jelly Belly sweets

Flowers, Fresh vs. Silk

For many brides the answer to the question of fresh or silk flowers is an easy one. Brides that are partial to fresh will hear nothing of carrying silk. However silk flowers have many advantages over fresh.

• For the creative and crafty bride silk flowers are ideal for a do it yourself wedding. Mistakes are easily fixed and there is plenty of information in books and on the net for how to do it.
• You can save a ton of money doing silk flowers yourself.
• Silk flowers can be sprayed to achieve color matches no matter what your theme is.
• Silks can also be sprayed to smell like the real thing, you can choose from many flower scents such as rose, lilacs, carnations, etc.
• Craft stores carry everything that you need to make the bouquets , corsages, and bouts for the men.
• If you’re not brave enough to do them yourself, you can order them through a florist, the advantage to silks either way is that you can request them prior to the wedding so that if anything is wrong you have plenty of time to fix or replace them.
• Silks last forever so if want your flowers as keepsakes you can even get a framed case to store and display them afterwards.
• Silks solve the problem of early wilting on very hot days, and with a mild dishwashing liquid they can be washed easily when needed.
• Your video and photos will show only the flowers, and not what they are made of. You will never see the difference between the fresh or the silk.

A couple flower tips for your photos,

• When posing with your bridesmaids, your flowers should be held a couple inches higher than your girls flowers.
• The brides bouquet should be held near the brides waist line. Most girls tend to carry the flowers too high at the bust hiding the beautiful details of the wedding gown.
• When selecting the flowers fresh or silk remember that the flowers are to serve only as an accent. You want the first thing people to see is the brides face, veil and dress. If the flowers are too large or loud those will draw the eyes first.
• Check with the location of your ceremony and see if you can contact the wedding right before or after yours, there may be a chance to split the cost of the church flowers with the other bride if you can work out the details of color and who takes them to their reception.
• Fresh flowers are best for the alter and giving to Mary.

Individuals looking for adventure travel prefer undisclosed travel destinations and no travel directions a lot, occassionally coming across a travel lodge during their voyage, keeping the spirit of adventure upbeat. They will do bus travel, walk, hitchhike, swim, anything actually.

More Wedding Don’ts

Here is more advice on what not to do at your wedding.

• If you are taking photos outside don’t face the sun, your eyes will be squinty and your faces pinched. If the sun is behind you , you will have better facial expressions, however with the light at your back you will be a little in the shadows so make sure your photographer is using flash fill which means he is using the flash to fill in the dark front of you. If you’re not sure ask him or her.
• Also with outside pictures in the sun, try to avoid trees. The sunlight through the leaves and branches will leave the same shadows on your person. It’s ok as long as you make sure there are other shots that show the dresses without shadows.
• Don’t let someone who has been a model pose herself especially in group shots. Although I’ve only seen this happen a couple times it looked worse than ridiculous. One of the bridal party did catalogue modeling and was striking poses. She thought she would stand out as a professional, but instead she stood out as a clown.
• Don’t treat your photographer as a paid slave to be at you side the entire ten or twelve hour day. Most of them are humans and as such do need to eat and use the facilities from time to time.
• It’s great to have a very fun reception, but adults don’t stand on table tops and make drunken fools of themselves.
• Make time for photos if they are important for you. Some brides and grooms start having fun and don’t want to be bothered for photos, then after the wedding they are very upset because they didn’t get all the photos they wanted.
• Another trend in midwest wedding reception halls is wrapping the chairs in material so that the colors match the wedding colors. This is a personal taste, but to me it looks tacky and like a fire hazard.

What Not To Do For Your Wedding

First let me tell you that I come to you with this list of wedding don’ts from over thirty-five years of experience in the wedding industry. During that time I have seen over thousands and thousands of brides and their weddings. My advice of what you shouldn’t do is

• don’t wear a strapless wedding gown if you are a big girl. You may not notice it but the flab hanging out of the dress around the bust and under the arms is very unflattering.
• this goes along with the above, don’t let designers dictate what you should wear because it’s the latest style. Over the past few years I have seen 99.9% of brides all wearing the same strapless gowns and the same style of head pieces which leads to the same hairstyles. If you don’t care about getting what you would really like and just want to follow the crowd  go for it. Some girls look gorgeous in that style, but it’s not for everyone, and I can’t believe that all brides have exactly the same tastes.
• I’ve also noticed lately that brides and their bridesmaids are not wearing any kind of panty hose or nylons. This is very tacky, It’s not a day at the beach, it’s your wedding why would you want to cheapen the look after paying hundreds, if not thousands for the dress?
• Shoes have become a pet peeve for me. Most designers have decided they want to reshape the foot at the toe area. So instead of your heals having the highest point where the big toe should be, they have decided to shape it like a triangle so that the tallest point is at the middle toe and the rest of your toes are bunched together in a space they don’t fit in. Add a high heel and some weight and you’ve the recipe for some real pain and distraction just when you don’t need that. Luckily, a lot of brides have a second pair of flat and comfortable gym or ballet shoes they wear for the reception.

Kosher Weddings

Are you planning on having a Kosher wedding? Bride-to-Kathryn is planning one, but as a recent convert, Kosher events are a little unfamiliar to her.

Q: I know that this is pre-mature, since I won’t be getting married for another 2 years, but my wedding has to be Kosher, and I cannot find any sites about who to go to and what needs to be done for a Kosher wedding. My mother and I are both clueless since she is Christian and I am reform (Jewish), and had never planned on having a Kosher wedding, but because of my groom, it has to be done.
I know that the meal will be Kosher, but what about the cake? So, do you have any advice?
–Kathryn

A: The Kosher issue is tricky, but it’s not as hard as you would imagine. Depending on where you are located and if you have a venue selected already or not, your process will differ slightly. This also assumes you are having a Saturday evening wedding.
Generally here is how it works: Either you are working with a space that is open to outside caterers or a venue with on-site catering. If you know in advance that you are going to need Kosher, you should start looking for venues that allow off-site caterers in. I think it works out more economically and often affords you more choice in WHO your Kosher caterer is.
If you have your reception facility booked already, you should start by asking your location for their recommendation/required kosher vendor. You should ask for the menu offered at your particular venue and move from there. Typically venues will have a preferred or required Kosher caterer and often they have a set menu that mirrors the menu offered at your venue.

Read the rest at the original post here., where Xochitl of Always a Bridesmaid Wedding Consulting, answers another etiquette question from Something Old, Something New.

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