Wedding Wishing Well

The idea of having a wedding wishing well came from my sister who lives in the US. I never heard of it and it was my Tita who lived in the US for a couple of decades who explained to me what a wedding wishing well was. A wedding wishing well is where your guests can drop their gift cards/envelopes and drop wedding wishes.

I did some further research and found out how it looked like. I couldn't find any locally, so I just had one made.

To customize the wishing well further I put a small standee on top to explain what it was and also put in a small memo pad where guests can write their wishes for us.

I got the Precious Moments Filipiniana wedding dolls during a trip to Kalibo, Aklan (I'm sure glad they survived Typhoon Ondoy).

I'm really glad we had a wedding wishing well because my hubby's pant pockets were already filled up with cards and envelopes. We also got a lot of wishes from guests and I placed it in our wedding scrapbook/wedding guestbook.

I'm renting out the wedding wishing well. Please leave me a message and your email address so I can send you more information. If you want one customized I can have it done for you too.

Personalize Your Wedding: Table Standees

One thing we wanted to do for our wedding was to make our guests experience "us". Most of our guests didn't really know about our love story. Most only knew half of the couple (either him or me). Most of them saw us sparingly throughout our relationship. And some never even met my groom before the wedding!

Table Standees

The table standees served two purposes:

One, to introduce and let our guests know more about our principal and secondary sponsors, and entourage. This comprised of several pages describing our wedding party.

Second, to give a preview of the timeline of our love story. Since our work involves the internet we decided to use "Clicks" instead of days (click on the second photo to see the text of our love story timeline). Our 800th click (day) was our wedding day.

I just made the standees myself with the following materials:

scented board
linen paper (for the entourage description)
photo paper (for the love story timeline)
ribbon
illustration board
double sided tape
scotch tape (to keep the ribbon from unraveling)
computer printer (I just printed everything at home)

It was a good thing I made myself some extra standees because our guests liked it so much they brought it home!

Custom Made Wedding Gowns

I cut down costs for my wedding and entourage gowns (and barongs) by more than 50% by having them custom made. I originally planned to spend 20% of our wedding budget on my wedding gown alone, but I couldn't seem to convince myself to to spend so much for a dress. I then decided to get the services of a designer and chose to have a simple wedding gown made.

It was my niece who designed all the entourage gowns. She's based in Jakarta and has been designing gowns as a hobby (she's an awesome artist too) and eagerly sent me some sketches via email. We just told her that our motif was blue and gold and that it was an early morning wedding.

Here's one of the sketches she made:

And the finished product:

Comparison of costs:
Designers/RTW Gowns: PhP2,500-3,000 per dress/gown
Custom Made (Patahi): PhP750-PhP1,200 per dress/gown

Divisoria dress shops do not design gowns. You can either bring a sketch, choose from their catalogue (magazines) or bring a print-out of any design you find online.

Are you looking for a wedding gown/entourage gown designer? Inquire here.

The Wedding Day Program (Script)

Our friends Gabe Mercado and Mhel Garrido brought the

house down with their funny antics all through-out the reception.

My friend just pinged me and asked for a copy of my wedding day script. She said she was asked to be the emcee of her friend's wedding and she couldn't find her script anymore. I easily found my script but told her that I just placed leading statements on it since my emcees were professionals (they just volunteered though for my wedding).

We were advised by our musician to start off the reception with the traditions (cake cutting, doves, garter toss etc.). They said that from experience a good percentage of people would leave right after eating. So this is how our program went:

Introduction and welcome
Parade of Entourage
Introduction of Principal Sponsors
Introduction of Parents
Couple's Grand Entrance
Cake Cutting and Wine Drinking
Dove Release
Garter Toss
Bouquet Throw
Prayer Before Meal
Photo Opp by Table
Routing of Wedding Book for Signing
Friends Harana
Distribution of Giveaways
Distribution of Gifts
Pre-nup AVP Showing
Champagne Toast
Best Man's Speech
Maid of Honor's Speech
Words of Advise: Bride's Parents
Words of Advise: Groom's Parents
Game for Couples
Father-Bride Dance
Couple's First Dance
On the Day AVP Showing
Word of Thanks from Couple

*We also created an AVP slideshow of our couple photos. It was used during the waiting time and lunch.