Wedding Summary
From WeddingWiki
Here's a breakdown of the wedding day. If you want to go straight to photos, here are the main places to look:
- Photos we've posted in our gallery
- Ian and Irene's pics on Flickr
- Pavel put some up on his website
- Some people have also posted albums on Facebook, for those with access. We're working on getting all of those into our gallery, too, but aren't there yet.
- Some answers to questions we got around the wedding in the FAQ.
- See Edmonton and Toronto pages for info related to planning the celebrations in each city
Contents |
Date and Location
- Date
- August 4, 2007. The first Monday in August is a holiday. Our wedding was on the Saturday of the long weekend, and the same day as Caribana, among other attractions.
- Location
- Enoch Turner Schoolhouse. Easy to get to by TTC and lots of Green P parking. The staff there were really helpful. We also know a number of couples who have either been married there or attended a wedding there. Photo
- Weather
- Fantastic. It was hot and humid on Thursday and Friday, but the humidity went away on Saturday and it was clear and 27 degrees Celsius.
Making us look good
- Outfits
-
- Groomsmen: Suits with cutaway jackets from Moore's
- Bridesmaids: Dresses from Denise & Co. Photo
- Wedding dress: Bride's mom insisted on a white dress for the ceremony, so we got a dress at a Chris & Tina's sale. The first place we tried for alterations botched the job, so we brought it to Chris & Tina's and they provided amazing service and fixed the dress so that it didn't look like a disaster that Nic wouldn't want to be caught dead in.
- Reception dress: A chocolate brown bridesmaid dress with a cornflower blue sash by Impression Bridal. Yes, Impression Bridal has a weird Web site with naked guys posing with the wedding gown shots - but their dresses look good and are reasonably priced. Purchased from The Dressroom. The staff was really nice and they loved that I was picking something unconventional to wear.
- Hair and makeup
-
- Makeup was done by our friend Dennie.
- Hair was done by Robyn, Bevan's girlfriend. She was amazing and styled hair for 7 girls plus herself in the space of 4 hours.
- Flowers
- Ruby Florist in New Century Plaza (Markham). Calla lilies for the brides bouquet and the groom's boutonnière, and roses for the bridesmaids.
Photos
Time: 2pm
We had the venue from 1pm - 1am (meaning everyone is out of the venue by 1am). We decided to do photos with immediate family and wedding party before the ceremony so that guests wouldn't be standing around for a couple of hours killing time between ceremony and reception. Aside from a minor traffic delay and a last-minute "sewing me into my white dress" job, it went smoothly.
The photographer was a friend of Nic.
Coordination
Becky, a good friend of Taavi's, was a huge help in organizing the day and coordinating on the day. She surpassed all expectations and want to recognize her for selflessly volunteering to help and doing a spectacular job.
Cousins Kimberly and Kenji took good care of the welcome table, and Sharon and Lily made sure the venue was cleaned up in good order.
Ceremony
Time: 4:30pm
- Officiant
- Kathryn Cook of the Humanist Association of Canada. She has performed weddings for several other couples that we know. We wrote the entire ceremony script, with the help of some suggested text from the officiant and from the giant vow repository on indiebride.com.
- Ceremony choir
- Pelayo organized a choir to sing for the processional and registry signing.
- Processional: The Lark In the Clear Air - Traditional irish melody. Words by Samuel Ferguson. Arranged by Donald Cashmore. Lyrics and a different arrangement here.
- Registry signing: Mon cœur se recommande à vous. By Orlando di Lasso.
- Recessional music
- Bevan and Kimi provided our recessional music on djembe and zills.
- Reading
- The Prophet on Marriage, by Khalil Gibran. Read by Taavi's mom.
- Vows
- Written by us. Email us if you want a copy.
- Wedding party
-
- Bridesmaids: Nic's cousins: Kimi and Julie, and Taavi's youngest sister, Maret
- Groomsmen: Taavi's brother Bevan, Nic's brother Rich, Taavi's friend Reid
- Rings
- Mokume gane rings in silver, rose gold, and shakudo by John Carnes. Purchased from Corktown Designs. The rings turned out great. John worked with us to create the metal combination, pattern, and width that we wanted.
- Decoration
- Led by Aunt Sandra, who provided the trellis for the ceremony, picked up and set up flowers, and made our card box.
Cocktails
Time: About 5pm-6pm.
- Food
-
- Caterer for cocktails and dinner was Penny Laine's. The venue has a list of approved caterers. When we asked for quotes from the caterers, we were impressed that this caterer responded with a customized example menu that took all of the food allergies in our families into consideration. They were helpful in the planning process and did a great job overall on the day. There were two food items that we got negative feedback about. The salad greens were getting brown by the time we got to them - however this might have been because we started dinner later than expected (lots of family photo taking during cocktails) and the dressing and salty olives probably started browning the greens... We also heard that a slice of spelt bread had some mold on it. Other than those two issues, the food was great!
- Hors d'oeuvres included spring rolls, gazpacho shots, chicken skewers, grapes covered in non-dairy cream cheese and rolled in pistachio, melon wrapped in prosciutto
- Signature frame
- We did this instead of a guest book. The photo is from our engagement photo shoot at The Music Garden down at Harbourfront.
- Music
- Since we're big music lovers, our DJ had a great idea - use a bunch of the music we like as cocktail music and dinner music. So we compiled a bunch of a cappella, jazz, and other music for the DJ to play. Lots of Can Con where possible. If you want the playlist, we can send it to you.
- DJ
- Brad from Skip-A-Beat Entertainment. We saw him at a wedding show, but we hated the show so much that we really didn't think much about the vendors we saw. But when we started interviewing DJs later, we clicked with Brad right away. He was really open to working with our ideas to make the wedding reflect our personalities, while still ensuring that the open dancing would be fun for everyone. He provided a lot of material that became a starting point for us to customize our reception and really helped us to organize. And on the wedding day, he did a great job of going with the flow, and working with our MC and wedding day coordinator so that everything ran smoothly for our guests.
Reception
- Entrance
-
- Wedding party entered to a remix of the theme from Super Mario Brothers :)
- We entered to the theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you don't know why, read our FAQ.
- MC
- Dennie. The reason we met. She kept it flowing and kept it fun, and even surprised us by getting the wedding party to act out the story of how we met using lines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was introduced with the song "I'm Cute" from the Animaniacs soundtrack.
- Kissing game rules
- Two options - Either sing a song that you don't normally hear at a wedding or perform a scene pre-written by Dennie from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We actually got volunteers for a good mixture of both. Song choices included:
- Love and Marriage
- Love Shack
- Lying Eyes
- Love Will Tear Us Apart
- Puff the Magic Dragon - which resulted in a sing-a-long
- Dinner
-
- Salad of mixed greens with tomatoes and green olives
- Chicken stuffed with tomatoes and pine nuts with a tomato sauce, with asparagus, bell peppers, and baby potatoes.
- The caterer provided some bite-sized pastries for the dessert table. Our cake was by another vendor.
- Aunt Sandra also made a Jamaican rum cake for the dessert table
- Cake
- Desserts by Danielle. Danielle is a friend of one of Nic's co-workers. The big challenge with the cake was finding a vendor who would do a good non-dairy cake (not just lactose-free) because of Taavi's dairy allergy. Danielle provided us with a sample up front (the caterer was hesitant and another vendor we talked to wouldn't provide a sample without signing a contract or paying $30) of two great flavours. We used the flavours we tried - Orange Honey for top tier and Chocolate Raspberry for the other tiers. She was also really flexible about the design of the cake, and the results were amazing and yummy. We got lots of compliments on the cake.
- Wine
- Homemade wine from Wine Kitz
- "The Red One": Gamay Bergamais
- "The White One": Riesling
- Beer with names that form geeky acronyms
-
- Old School Pale Fusion (OSPF)
- Taavi's Coffee Porter (TCP)
- Curiously Delightful Raspberry Wheat (CDRW)
- Favours
- Loose tea from the House of Tea
- Sencha Asatsuyu green tea
- Cool Lemon rooibos tea
- Earl Grey with blue flowers
- Performances
-
- Nicole, Nic's cousin, sang I Can See Clearly Now near the beginning of the reception. A cappella and Holly Cole style (more Can Con!)
- Nicola opened with a belly dance number to Double Doom Drum Solo by Djinn
- Mary, a lead dancer with Arabesque Dance Company, performed a 30-minute belly dance show, including getting the wedding party and others to dance with her and learn a few moves.
- Kirsten Sandwich performed 4 songs: Come Again, Strawberry Fields, and You Sexy Thing (with Taavi on lead vocals serenading Nic) going straight into Kiss.
- Slide show
- The slide show was presented after a break around 8pm. Lisel put together the slide show from pictures in Taavi's family albums and photos from Nic's dad. The second background song for the slide show was Your Personal Penguin - music to the words of the book by the same name. Dennie showed us the book at her home, and Nicola joked that the words could be used as our vows.
- Speeches
-
- Kimi did a toast to start dinner
- Tyler gave a speech to the bride and groom
- We gave a thank you speech
- Dennie told the story of how we met using Bevan, Julie, and Kimi as her actors.
- Dancing
-
- Bride and groom first dance was right after grand entrance. Norah Jones, Come Away With Me.
- Parent dance with bride and groom: Have I Told You Lately by Van Morrison
- Dedications: Only You by The Platters for Nic's parents and This Love Is A Weed by Tom Lips for Taavi's mom and stepdad.
Hotel
Novotel on the Esplanade. Buffet breakfast and Caribbean brunch (thanks to Caribana happening that weekend). Fried plantain...mmmm...
The room had an amusing special feature. We had the pool and hot tub to ourselves most of the time that we were there on Monday morning. We tested out Nic's camera for the first time underwater.
We got complimentary champagne and one free breakfast ticket for the two nights that we stayed there.
