Archive for the “Our Wedding” Category

Ever since I was a little girl imagining the day of my wedding I could never picture myself in a white dress. Maybe the reason for this is that I grew up being quite a tomboy and never wore dresses. Naturally, the dress shopping was the most dreaded wedding related task for me and I have been trying to push it back as long as I could. I’ve been looking online a lot and tearing out the pages of the magazines with the dresses I liked, but not doing anything else. Finally, I realized that I don’t have that much time left for my search (you need to order the dress at least half a year before the wedding). So a few weeks ago I made the call, set up an appointment, took my friend along and went out to try dresses in the South Bay (the longer you have to drive, the bigger the chance you’ll find the perfect dress, right? :)

Everybody has heard about the dress shopping experience being a lot of fun, but it’s also a lot of work. After visiting two bridal stores and trying on about thirty dresses we were exhausted. There were a few dresses we kind of liked, but nothing that really stood out. I still didn’t know what I want, but knew exactly what I don’t want – nothing too puffy, no crystals, no beads. I knew that if it’s hard for me to move in the dress, it was not for me. I wanted something simple, earthy, organic and flowwy. I found a few of those in the magazines, but to my dismay none of them looked good on me.

Can you tell we were tired? :)

Last week I made another round of appointments, this time in San Francisco. Again, we found a few dresses that we liked and at the end of the day we walked into a small bridal salon in North Beach. Soon, we realized that there was nothing really to look at, nothing that I would be excited to try, but just because it took us a while to find the salon, I decided to at least try something on. It was here that one of the dresses on the racks suddenly caught my eye. The dress was nothing like what we looked at before, but for some reason I felt the urge to give it a try anyway.

No, I didn’t have a “That’s the One!” moment when I put it on and I didn’t get all teary eyed. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I liked it when I came out of the fitting room. But the more I looked at myself in the mirror, the more I realized that the dress is just perfect and I can totally picture myself wearing it for the wedding.

Well, the next morning I came back for my perfect wedding dress :)

Here are five tips that helped me find the dress:

1. Right after you get engaged and before you make your mind up on a wedding dress style, go to the largest bridal salon in your area. Try to have an open mind and try on a variety of wedding gowns, don’t eliminate anything at first glance. Even though certain styles work best on certain body types, don’t let the “rules” narrow your search too much. And if the salesperson brings you something she says you must try — try it, even if you don’t like the way it looks on the hanger.

Now that you know the basic style of the wedding dress that suits you, you can search the Internet and bridal magazines comparing fabrics and subtle design changes that may look even better. Make notes, tear off magazine pages you liked, and bring them to your next wedding gown appointments. Try not to get too attached to a wedding dress that looks great on paper, there’s always a chance that you won’t like it in person.

2. Start looking for your wedding dress at least nine months before the wedding day, because the whole style of the wedding should match the style of the bride’s dress. If you’ll fall in love with a vintage wedding dress, your whole wedding will have to reflect that :) Also, it takes about six months for your wedding dress to arrive from the manufacturer and for it to be properly fitted.

3. For your own sanity, bring along only a couple of very important to you people, maybe your mom and a supportive friend with great taste. Three or more people are going to be offering a ton of conflicting opinions and it’s going to create unnecessary drama. Advice is important, but you should remember that it’s your wedding day after all and to listen to your instincts; if you have to be reassured that the dress looks great on you, it’s probably not the one. Can you really see yourself walking down the aisle in this gown? If not, take it off and try another one on.

4. Dress shopping should be fun. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too much in one day, if every wedding dress is starting to look the same, call it a day.

5. Your perfect wedding dress is the one you don’t want to take off. It sticks out in your mind and you find yourself comparing all the others to it, you feel accomplished and excited when you go home.
But even after you think you’ve found your wedding gown, take a day, sleep on it and come back to the salon the next day. You want to be absolutely sure it’s the one for you: since bridal gowns are custom-made, they are absolutely non-returnable.

Hope that helps and good luck!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been two months since our last wedding planning related blog post! But we did not forget about it, on the contrary, we spent all this time still searching for both the photographer and for the right venue. We could have never imagined that the planning would be so difficult from the beginning! We wanted to book the venue and photographer at the same time so that we wouldn’t limit our choice of photographer by the date we set. Sounds like it should be pretty easy, but it sure wasn’t! And so this last week was a big one for us and we finally have a date, a venue, and even the photographer of our dreams.

I’ll start with the most important part… drum roll please… the date of the wedding is….. 9/10/10! We are inviting just 30 people to the wedding and our hopes are that these people won’t mind taking the Friday off as it will allow all of us to spend the rest of the weekend relaxing.

The venue update is next: we absolutely fell in love with both the Ranch from our last blog post and also with the cute villa. It was a tough choice and we had to make a long list of pluses and minuses of both places. At the end we decided to go with the villa! Although both places are absolutely gorgeous, we felt that this venue would be a better match for our tiny wedding.

And lastly, the part everyone has been asking about ever since we got engaged… the photographer! This was honestly the toughest choice we’ve had to make. The challenge was that we both knew what style and type of photographer we wanted and we were absolutely not willing to compromise on it. Fortunately, we wanted more or less the same thing, otherwise we’d have to hire one photographer for the bride and one for the groom :)

We started our search by looking at Bay Area photographers, then at ones in Southern California. What we found is that although there are a ton of absolutely amazing artists in this state whom we adore and even sometimes idolize, their styles were a little different than what we had in mind. So our search circle got bigger and bigger, and we started looking at East Coast and even some Canadian photographers, until we finally found someone whose work we both absolutely admire:

We first learned of Greg Gibson a few years back at one of the photography conventions we attended. I remember that even then we were amazed at his strong photojournalistic approach and constant search for ways to tell the story. We were both beyond happy when he agreed to come out to Napa for our wedding!

Next on the list is the dress shopping and I’ll let you all know how that will go. Until then, have a great week everybody and stay dry in these upcoming storms!

Natasha

This past Thursday we finally found some time to go to the wine country again to do some food tasting and to take a look at a few more venues. It’s been two months since we went to search for venues last time and I just couldn’t wait to finally have time for the second visit!

First on our list was a vineyard with a beautiful villa we could rent for a few days. This place seemed to have everything – beautiful landscaping and views, a pool, an outside fireplace and even a jacuzzi! What I liked the most is that for those few days the whole place is going to be ours and we won’t have to obey any stupid rules some other venues seem to have! Oh and one more good thing – the majority of the wedding would be on the cobblestone so I would be able to wear the high heels I was dreaming of :)

We had another private villa on our list that morning. The lady was a bit secretive and didn’t want to give us the address of the place; instead, she asked to meet us at BR Cohn Winery so we would follow her to the house. Why? After seeing the place we’d know the address anyway right? After 15 minutes of following her SUV up a super windy road we saw the house on the top of the hill. As promised, the view from there was just breathtaking – we could see the entire Sonoma Valley from there!

We didn’t like the house itself as it was way too tiny even for our size wedding and way too overpriced, but I absolutely fell in love with this bathroom in the bridal suite:

I had a few giggles imagining how many drunk grooms had to sleep on the floor after not being able to climb this Everest of a bed :)

We had some time before our next appointment so we decided to stop for lunch at Caffe Citti. I would really recommend to check out this place when you’re in the Sonoma area! We had the best prosciutto sandwiches ever!

Unfortunately, the food in the cafe was so good that we just couldn’t stop and arrived to our next appointment, which was supposed to be a food tasting, completely full. It seems silly to do that, but it’s probably good to try food when you are not completely starved and inhale anything edible :)

Well, so now we are trying to decide between the Ranch we loved so much during our last visit:

…and the first villa we just saw.

I’m starting to panic a bit as our fall is getting booked very quickly at this point and we’re in danger to not have a date for our wedding! I think we are going to choose within a couple of weeks and I’ll be sure to let you all know what we settled on :)