orangemew

I received the professional photos online/via DVD from photographer Thomas Slack last week. There weren't as many photos as I was hoping- for instance he would have half a dozen when I was posing after getting ready and before meeting F, but only one shot of me hugging my dad after our first dance, and hardly any of the guests pouring water during the Thai Ceremony. Fortunately, I was able to add to the photos thanks to the pictures I got from guests. I put them together into a slideshow that I plan to burn on DVD and give to my parents to share with relatives in Thailand in December. The videographer will not be delivering until 4 months after the wedding, which means late December...

Pongched Laskey Wedding Summary from Pechluck Pongched on Vimeo.

This is a slideshow summary of our wedding celebration created from various digital photos provided by our professional vendors such as photographer Thomas Slack and photobooth by ShutterBox as well as shared by family and friends such as Judy, Woodie, and Dr. Kiriwat. Thank you for being there for the celebration of our big day and helping to capture these memories. It was hard cutting out so many pictures (despite the length of the video) because where were so many great photos of all those who are dear to us.



Our professional video DVD and an online highlights video from Dunamis Video will be delivered to us sometime in late December so this was created to share with our friends and family who were not able to be there that day- or maybe who were :).



Created using Windows MovieMaker for the first time!

Pictures from the Thai Temple when we made our offerings and had the water and the sai mongkon string blessed for our wedding. We performed this ceremony on Thursday in anticipation of the wedding on Saturday.

I wanted to extend a special thank you to my two sisters and M, my sister's fiance, for helping make this happen. L went out and searched out all the images, J put together a template for printing this on the place cards, and M wrote a program so that we could use a spreadsheet to read the guest names, table assignment, meal selection, and image and lay them all out for me on place cards, and F put together the table name/numbers cards. This all had to be done so I can print everything on my color printer in Portland before I head to Chicago on Tuesday.

I have been so focused on the paper DIY touches since I have a color printer here, and there isn't one that my family owns in Chicago. This is a bit mind-boggling to me that with all the electrical toys my parents has and my techie brother that this is true. It meant a bit of extra planning ahead, but since L, M, and J helped lay things out and I just had to review it and print, it wasn't too bad at all. The only hard part on my side was it involved a hunt for the size of the place cards and naturally, there was only one last box at the farther office supply store that F had to put on hold. But, I went after work and got it from behind the counter!

Anyway, here is the inspiration for our Table Names that the five of us have been working on.

Thank you Mrs. Hummingbird of Weddingbee for sharing this expansion from the traditional numbers and city/travel themes to this...


Yes, the geek/nerd that reflects us will be part of the wedding. Besides videogames, we also threw in lots of food (varying from restaurants to food dishes to Thai fruit) and character series (like Transformers, Mario, Pixar, and Disney) and a lot of random other favorites, so it is not as cohesive as the videogame theme inspiration created by this couple, but well... that's what F and I are like.

When I saw the hard work of M in pdf format of these (apparently he stayed up until 6am writing the program to automatically lay this out), it was the first time I actually started to feel excited instead of buried by tasks and drama. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of planning, and instead of just wanting to hurry up and get everything done and this whole thing over... I just wish the day could be etched in my mind in amazing detail forever and not a blur like some have told me it will become. I want to soak it in, this feeling that I saw when I saw what L and J and M did: the love that drove them to give me this humongous effort to put together this crazy idea I wanted and make it happen. Thanks, you're my heroes, and I appreciate it all.

Yeah, I won't think about how all that rush to get this done actually was more stress then it turns out necessary because I just found out my parents want to shift some table layout and don't want to finalize the placecards until after I'm in Chicago. After some negotation (it was argued that color printes are "useless", they agreed to purchase a color printer at least so I can finish them up there... but the hard foundational stuff is done. Yeah!

Tomorrow I fly out to Chicago... and this week is the final countdown to the big day.

Finally... if you thought this idea was a crazy amount of work, I also liked this one from knottie JanuaryBride which highlights Chicago... but not as much. What a great idea she had though for spotlighting a really great photo by incorporating it to placecards. Honestly though, the childlike is more us then the sophisticated photography artist. We're just not that hip.

I had posted previously about the tastings I had for the food... and now that I have just finished making the menus, I wanted to show you what deliciousness I have planned.

I don't have pictures of the real programs yet, as I sent them un-assembled and uncut to Chicago, and that's where they will be done. But, I do have a trial run that was done (so ignore the slight uneven-ness). Special shout-out to bridesmaid and sister J for doing this, and keeping me sane by being in Chicago to help deal with errands and drama as they arise.

The first page is made of the same Aquamarine metallic cardstock that I used for the enclosures, and re-uses the fonts and motifs from the invite panel. The rest of the layered pages include, on the Aquamarine metallic paper but now in text weight:

1. A Civil Ceremony page which lists the entire agenda for both ceremonies (most importantly noting the intermission between the Civil and Thai ceremony)
2. A Thai Ceremony page which explains what will happen and the symbolism behind the items and actions in the ceremony
3. The third Cocktail Hour page lets guests know the hours of cocktail and the hours of the reception, lists the bar menu, and the passed hors d'oeuvres, informs them of the photo guestbook and the photobooth inside the house/tent, and our thank yous. I figure this gives the guests something to look forward to during the intermission.

Finally, the last page uses the same Blue Opal opalescent paper that was also used for the enclosures. It was great that I after I recalculated all the paper products I wanted to make, I had the right amount of paper from my original order for the invitations to make all these.



Meanwhile, here are the menus that will be at each place setting. Somehow I stupidly printed only enough for 135, so I need 35 more of the menus: thankfully, that is only 10 sheets or so, and we can cut them on our own.

For the other sheets, I went to the Kinkos where for $1.49 a cut, they did the three cuts that would cut each 8.5x11" sheet into 3 menus (printed on Aquamarine text, the same paper the invitation panel was printed of) and three cuts to size the metallic navy blue matting (which echoes the same color of the pocketfold, though in text weight and not cardstock). After the cuts were made, I matted the menu using glue dots for some and double-sided table for others. The double-sided tape was much easier to work with as it was easier to apply to the paper, and also to move it if it wasn't straight or centered enough after I first put it down.



( the pictures of the food... just sample size though (pictures were taken at my tasting)! )

Don't they look fun? My videographer, Dunamis Works has a blog, and recently made this highlights clip from covering a 3 day wedding.

Actually, I have been to two Indian weddings, but they were both Muslim, so they didn't do any the things in the videos: much more conservative, including have the men and women separated for the reception meal.

I cant' wait to see how Wijaya covers my wedding next week!

Sonal & Rishin - SDE from Dunamis Works on Vimeo.

Here are some of my favorites from our engagement photo shoot with Evrim Icoz. The album I ended up getting was more than I had planned and budgeted for, as was purchasing the CD of photos, but the value is priceless.


( more photos ahead )

F somehow found this song, and that was it. His mother loves Barry Manilow, which I found out when F and I unwittingly were able to enjoy a Barry Manilow impersonator during our first New Year's Eve together: we had only planned to join an event of a Murder Mystery Train and Dinner. Turned out dinner included "Barry Manilow".

And, as F also pointed out, the song is only two minutes long.

Actually, the first thing he pointed out was the length, and then that his mom liked the singer. So the song length was the winning characteristic.

With the photobooth, we have the option of having plain simple photostrips for our guestbook and guests... or our names and dates. The options can be pretty cute...

Which do you like?

( example designs for the photo strip )

Or, with no logo, I guess we could manage 4 pictures to a strip instead. Hmm...

I had three choices for my father daughter dance that immediately came to mind. My dad was insistent on a very slow song, and that made me narrow my choice to the first. Sometimes my dad would sing just the main lyrics of this song (I don't even know if he knew the whole song), so it seemed perfect. The other two were chosen because the first for its obvious link between a father and daughter, and the second because it was sung by a well-meaning father and I was a Sound of Music fanatic when I was very young, including having home videos of me reenacting some of the songs. Really though, this was my first choice of the three.

After my parents trying to find the example tune and only finding a karaoke version and instrumental trumpet version of Love Me Tender(!) which they were trying to convince me on even though I insisted the original was already nice and slow for a whole week, I finally found this version on YouTube and sent it to them and they were fine with it. It was picked out the last day, during the evening, of the music list deadline for my DJ, naturally. I had sent them the first two videos, and they went with my first choice. I had given them a lot of advance warning in case they wanted to use a Thai song instead, but that never materialized. I still think it's a great song though, even though I was excited at having a Thai song for a bit.



( the choices that didn't make it )