Celebrity Makeup

I want to be prepared when I land in the Philippines and go meet my suppliers and do some trials. Hair is always on a bride's mind at the forefront, but makeup should also be kept in mind. Bridal makeup, is also a whole different animal because there is a daytime element, as well as the night time. So unless I can pull off two different looks (a look for the ceremony, and then a look for the reception - but what would that mean for the pictures in between?), I am going to find looks that I like, that I think will suit me, for both times of day.

The obvious thing to do, would be to look at the makeup on bridal magazines. The next, I wanted to find looks on individuals and celebrities that have the same/similar skin tone and structure. Filipino, doesn't quite into the Asian, as much as people want to believe, so I looked at specifically Filipino women.

My favourite Pinay celebrity, that I love because of her happy personality, and more natural looks (as opposed to the various plastic surgery celebrity pinays - and I don't count her early modeling days with all the coloured contacts, bleh) is Marian Rivera. Here are some looks of her, make-up wise, that I will be showing my makeup artist.

I chose these because of the emphasis on the eyes, especially the upper lids and lashes, that brightens the eyes. Most of these have a more muted lip, but there's one picture with a more pronounced lip that could do the trick for the reception. Note: it was hard finding pics of her make-up'ed, just because she rocks the neutral and natural all the time. But that's also because she gorgeous.

How can you not adore her?

Next is to scan top suppliers of Philippine weddings, including celebrities, to source other looks!

Attempting the Details

Sometimes I wonder if by posting things about the wedding, I'm diminishing the surprise element? What do you think?

I love discussing it, and don’t have someone with me all the time to hear me ramble about my wedding plans. If I did, gawd, poor them! I feel like only other brides can really deal with your wedding ramble, and its only out of respect because you'll listen to theirs. Also, maybe it will be a source of ideas for some bride bouncing around the internet and reading other bridal blogs.

On the one hand, I feel like I'm getting rid of the element of surprise. But then again, I have 20 people attending my ceremony, who most, don’t even read this blog. So they're still going to be somewhat surprised, and those who can't make, it can bask in my vision.

Ceremony spoiler alert, for those that want to be surprised!

The ceremony is really coming together. We've so far started to paint the picture of what we want the scene to look like by discussing the type of arch, chairs and bench we want. We've booked a violinist. We've discussed an officiant, who hasn't been booked, but we could probably do that soon enoough. I've started an outline of the actual ceremony (more on that later) and asked one of my good friends of mine to help put the ceremony together…since he's very progressive and very well connected with his progressive Church, he'll be able to contribute in a big way. Now for some smaller ceremony and décor details.

We don't have any cute little boys to play ring bearer, so likely someone else will be bringing the rings. We decided to add to our ceremony a Ring Warming Ceremony, where we will pass our rings around at the beginning of the ceremony so that our guests can say a little prayer or blessing for us. We're so lucky that a few people will be making the trip to our wedding, and we want to include them in the ceremony.

But rings are small, and we're going to be on sand, so we want it to be attached to something someone can keep an eye on, and can't be dropped very easily. So we thought of the Ring Book. Rather than having a little tacky pillow cushion, we are going to use a book with a secret compartment that will hold the rings.

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Off weddingbee.com, I found this great tutorial on how to make one. Martha Stewart's got one too, but I'm going to support the non-corporate-brand of making a Ring Bearer Book. I really like the vintage feel of the ring book here.

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R loves the idea, but we were also thinking of making the book significant too. We came up with Carlos Bulosan's America Is In The Heart. A well written, honest bibliographical account of struggle of migrants in agricultural work in the U.S. during the 1930s. He also talks about labor politics and the attacks on unionists. He describes horrific discrimination, starvation and ultimate struggle. Anyways, its our kinda story.

Unfortunately, we'll have to cut up the book to make the Ring Book. But we were hoping that we would stop and highlight a really deep thought provoking line, that people will see when they open it to see our rings. Even more unfortunate, is our inability to find a copy of this book in Hardcopy. Honestly, no one sells it or appears to have ever published it. I looked online at Amazon, and some other places, but also scowered Kijiji and Ebay to see if someone internationally wants to part with it…. For under $40.

So, our options is are (in order of easiest, to hardest, which also happens to be worst to best case scenario)
- find another generic book that has absolutely no significance but is pretty.
- look for a book binder who can magically make a paperback to a hardcover. (As I wrote, this I googled a bookbinder in Toronto, called them and found out that they can do it - after checking the book first - but it cost $60, and they cannot emboss images, just text. So in addition to actually buying the book $20, we're looking at almost $100 to destroy the book)
- look through my contacts to find that business card of Carlos Bulosan's editor who I met in 2007. Maybe he has an extra hard copy he can sell me?

The last option would be to figure out how to make this a paperback into a hardcopy. I'm sure someone crafty can help me with this…
Ugh. Gotta figure out our options with this one!

Ding! Another Idea.

Yesterday, we registered at The Bay. We figured, that maybe some people who couldn't come to our wedding may still want to give us a gift instead. It was a little bit grueling because the "Consultant" asked questions like...how many people are coming to your wedding? (um, 50? I wish) How many to your shower? (I'm not planning a shower, so I lied) Do you think you will want stainless steel or black appliances? (Seriously?) Anyways, 30 minutes in, both Isabela and Rodney were dead and ready to go. Rodney said, "Camille, this is like shopping. And you know how I feel about shopping."

So the best thing, is that they gave me a couple Wedding mags for free. I kind of have a lot already, but I like going through ideas and looking at pictures for inspiration. And what do you know, back at home while sitting on the couch looking through magazines, I had a eureka moment for our giveaways.

Since our wedding is close to Christmas, we thought about giving our guests a tiny parol as an ornament! A Parol is a star lantern that is adorned during the Christmas holiday. It is found only in the Philippines, so a truly Filipino tradition, which fits perfectly with our Filipinana theme. Usually wedding favours are tiny things people eat (I've gotten chocolates, and even tea bags), or some other "gift" (I've seen paper fans, rock magnets, and miniture angels). Sometimes the gifts are bordering useless, but with this as an ornament, this can be kept year after year, and our wedding will be reminded every holiday season. Great right? Now, just to talk this over with the WC (Wedding Coordinator) and find some in the Phils. Best case scenario would be ones with a nice pearly sheen made out of a shell. Man, I love it.

And isn't it just us, to have a STAR?!

Invitation Drafts

I decided not to do overtime this weekend, partly because I was exhausted, but mostly because Isabela's been experiencing some separation anxiety and is coming down with a cold. Anyways, some free time at home (after a trip to Michael's), means I got to put together some drafts for the invitations.

Initially, I was waiting until I got InDesign from my brother, but the mail was not good to us, so I decided to make them in Word. Seriously. They turned out really well though. But I'll have to recreate it on InDesign anyways, because we want to make a version appropriate to email as an evite as well.

We also had a printer mishap. The awesome Epson all-in-one printer I've had throughout University, essentially died, after we spent $75 on ink. After spending most of the weekend trying to fix it (because I needed to print a 50% off coupon for Michaels), we decided to buy a new printer. So the invitation expenses are sort of going through the roof because of these things. In addition, remember how I mentioned in my last post using oneheartweddings for clipart? Well if you don't cancel your free trial, they automatically charge you $39US and subscribe you for a year. Take a guess how I figured that one out.

Anyways, despite those things, we decided to still go forward and DIY our invitations. We figured if we paid for invitations, we'd have to pay to get a matching RSVP card, and then programs, and other stationary.

Our expenses so far from just these drafts have been:

1. Around $30 for different decorative paper, the linen paper and 5x7 cuts of the chocolate and bronze paper, plus a rounded corner punch.
2. $39 for the wedding clipart website that I didn't really want to subscribe to.
3. $75 for ink for our old printer. (I'm going to put up the unopened packs up for sale on Kijiji)
4. $50 for a new printer.
5. $55 for a paper trimmer,  pearl embellishments, a square punch and ribbon.

For a total of $249. Booooo. Way too much before the actual invitations. Hopefully, we'll cut it back with selling the ink on Kijiji.

Anyways, we were trying to figure out a few things with these drafts:

• Chocolate or Bronze back layer
• Dark green leaf design or the outlined one
• a more ornamental decorative paper or the leaf design.

Good thing we tested everything, because we ended up choosing a different combination than we had initially thought we wanted. I won't say what we decided, so you'll just have to wait until I show the finished invites.

If you're wondering. I downloaded the fonts for free from DaFont. The main text is Day Roman, while our names are in Shit Happens. I also got the image from OneHeartWeddings.

I also wanted to do an RSVP card, that speaks to our website where people can respond to our invitation, as well as have access to other information. So I did a smaller card as well on the linen paper, using the same fonts and another image from the Oneheartweddings (gotta get my moneys worth!).

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Finally, to bring it all together, we needed a band to literally hold it all together. I had danced with a few ideas, but after requesting a DIY from pink loves chocolate, I got the idea of using a ribbon. Instead of a monogram,  I decided we could bring it together using a picture. Note, this ISN'T the picture we're going to use. I just took it 10 minutes before making our drafts, so I can see if it was seriously, super tacky or not. We'll probably do a nicer one in black and white or sepia, but Rodney does like the idea. Especially, since we'll be mailing the invitations to his family in the Philippines, who don't have many pictures of us and might really like it.

So theres a little bit of tweaking that needs to be done still, and a new family photo for our belly band. But, I think we got a good plan to make our DIY invitations. I'm really, super excited!!

Inspiration

So building a theme for a wedding is really tiring and difficult to describe in words. I got really lucky as one of my closest friends, former roommate, and to throw in some more goodness 2006-2007 President of the Students Administrative Council at the University of Toronto, and 2007-2008 Ontario Chair for the Canadian Federation of Students, representing over 700,000 students, has volunteered to make my e-vite and paper invitations! I am so happy she volunteered (I didn't even ask her...well, not really), and I know she may not be able to come to the wedding but having her be a part of it, makes me smile inside.

But to describe what I wanted to her was a challenge. I wrote as much as I could, pulled different pictures of sample invitations, colour pallets, Filipinana themed items, pictures of barongs, even tribal tattoos. I hope she's got an idea of what we want now.

I came to the realization, that this is going to be a future endeavor : constantly trying to describe my theme and look. So how else do you mitigate this need? You make an inspiration board!
(I'm sure you didn't see that coming)

Board number one encompasses everything right now. What do you think? Do you have a better idea of where we're going with this now?

While looking for everything I needed to send her, I went through lots of DIY wedding blog sites and have become really excited at that prospects of printing and embellishing invitations on my own. I actually went to visit Michel's to get some ideas of tools and jewels and ribbon. The paper I need isn't there but I did find a super cool paper place in Toronto to go check out. I suggest to everyone to do your invitations yourself. Even if you can't design, you could get something printed flat from a cool site like Wedding Paper Divas and soope it up yourself. They even have a blog to show you how. I'm so excited, I ended up getting things for scrapbooking and got crafty on some pages for Isabela's scrapbook.