Work in progress

my seatmate cecil is designing the wedding invitations right this very minute! i can't help but roll my chair over to her mac and watch her at work every now and then. the design is turning out beautifully, and much more personalized than we originally intended.

from this peg...

to this...

it's actually beginning to look more like this...

and uses images of some of our most memorable places, like this (paris, engagement 2006):

this (mumbai, anniversary 2007)

and this! (hong kong, anniversary 2005)

can't wait to see the finished invites!

Have a seat

more for our travel-themed wedding: luggage tag place cards! so glad kaye agreed to print these for me for free! sulit talaga siya.

photos from style me pretty (thanks for the link, z!) and martha stewart weddings (i think).

A piece of cake?

one of the very first things marlon and i decided on almost a year ago, way back when we started planning, was to have a travel-themed wedding.

and one of the cutest travel-themed wedding details that i saw while scouring for ideas was this wedding cake by cake artist judy uson – a stack of suitcases (and a very rounded bride and groom) made out of fondant icing. marlon liked the idea too.

it’s perfect! i crowed to myself as i picked up the phone and dialed judy. like all too many wedding thingamajigs, the cake was perfect but the price definitely not so. for at least 15 g’s, these sugar suitcases might as well have been wheelie bags – they rolled way, way out of our budget immediately... forever.

or so i thought.

fast forward to june, when we sat down to meet our heaven-sent caterer, kaye cunanan (who deserves a separate post). as we discussed the cake, which kaye would throw in for free, she mentioned that her cake supplier was none other than judy uson! pretty soon, kaye was penciling in “luggage cake” into her neat leather binder as visions of our beautiful luggage cake – for free! – swirled in my head.

over the months, i fantasized more about a wedding cake than can possibly be considered healthy.

what would we put on top? an artist’s palette or a pair of glasses for marlon? sheets of music or a pair of high heels for me?

kaye’s email in september brought an unexpected dilemma. and i quote: “judy uson’s luggage cake is rrrrrealllly expensive.” for a single-layer, all-edible, 14x14x5.5-inch cake, we’d have to add P6,800 to the total catering cost! sweetheart that kaye is, she offered to transport the cake for us so that we wouldn’t have to pay judy’s P3,500 out of town charge.

kaye also sent me the cake designs that judy could provide for free. they’re fine, i guess, but nothing that really knocks my socks off – or does anything for the travel theme.

so the question is: do we splurge on the suitcase, or go with one of the freebies?

i don’t quite know where i am on it. i mean, it’s six grand we didn’t intend to spend. for something that’s going to be cut into pieces and eaten within hours of its delivery. (i was this way about flowers, too.) on the other hand, other couples have easily dropped twice, even thrice as much dough (pardon the pun) on taller, fancier cakes that are actually four parts styrofoam to one part cake!

sigh. and it’s luggage! perfect for our theme!

if deciding could only be a piece of cake. :-P

---

all photos from judy uson's website.

Boarding school

when i saw boarding pass save-the-date cards on a new york-based design site, i knew they'd be the perfect design peg for our travel-themed wedding.

so with some specialty papers from national, some help from my wonderful cubicle-mate cecil (a gifted and super kikay art director!), a gold gel pen, the office printer (shhh!!!) and a cutter, i produced a couple of save-the-date cards to give to marlon's guests from singapore!

the bar code font was a cute touch added by cecil!

i colored in these gold emblems by hand, baby! ... and almost went cross-eyed doing it! the effort was more than worth it though when marlon told me he absolutely loved them -- and so did everyone who received them a couple of months back. anyway, i only had to make around 20 pieces. (p.s. don't ask me to compute the cost per piece -- i really suck at things like that.)

now, on to the next challenge: finding a printer who can do our dream passport-inspired invites within budget. good luck to me!

The making of a motif

i had the perfect color motif in mind right off the bat.

marlon liked it. i liked it. it was different. it was refreshing.

and so, seeing these teacups on design sponge, i thought the quest for the wedding motif would be a no-brainer.

boy, was i wrong.

the search began in earnest when my partner at work, a phenomenally talented art director whose creative input i totally respect, told me: "ganon? nacho libre ang theme ng kasal mo?"("really? you're having a nacho libre-themed wedding?")

the man was right. needless to say, i was crushed. so it was back to the drawing board for me. well, maybe not the drawing board, but (tadaaah!) a color board!

color board 1.

one of the absolute best times marlon and i had together (out of many!) was attending his friend shivaani's wedding two christmases ago in kolkata. memorable for many reasons -- it was the first christmas we spent together. plus he met my family in kolkata, something i never thought in my wildest dreams was possible with a significant other.

we were so taken by the wedding that we entertained (for a brief, shining moment) the thought of having our own indian wedding... until the family of bride started handing out ang pao (money) to all the guests. eeep.

anyway, i took photoshop's eyedropper tool to a photo of the sari i wore to the wedding, and...

not bad eh? but wait! there's more!

color board 2.

i had amassed a gig small collection of images from my daily visits to design sponge. arranging them on a virtual sheet of paper, i found that i was drawn to the following colors again and again...

which were actually pretty close to the sari swatches. and so with some help from a book of pantone color chips i found at the office, the groom's approval (he picked the metallic accent), and a little tweaking from my wonderful friend and entourage designer tria, the quest for the perfect wedding motif came to its happy end...

purple, gold and turquoise! or, on days when i'm feeling frou-frou, amethyst, gold and aquamarine! hee hee!