Wedding vendor review

I've been meaning to do a review / summary of the people that we dealt with for our wedding but I never got around to it. Better late than never I guess. We found that reading about other people's experience was really helpful to us, so I'm trying to pay the favour forward.

For reference, we had our wedding in Ottawa Canada, May 2007. Like with most couples (I assume), we made the decisions together, but Laura had a stronger influence on the decisions than I did. Laura didn't have any "story book" image in her head. We wanted it to be "us" (not too formal), and lots of fun. Those were the main criteria.

The Invitations

Laura had done many, many mock-ups of wedding invitations. So many so that I was going nuts. One of Laura's friends with a background in design sent Laura a design of a invitation with a rivet in the corner binding the cards of the invite together. We both really liked this idea but didn't have the means to make it happen. We contacted Christy-Ann Drouin-Moore of Tagz to help us out. She was great and we were really happy with the result.

The Ceremony

We loved the idea of an outside wedding, but you are always taking a risk with the weather. We ended up selecting the Billings Estate Museum which was just down the road from us. They had a tent that we had as our "plan B" if the weather was nasty. Luckily we had awesome weather (max: 22.3 ∞C, min: 10.7 ∞C, average: 16.5 ∞C) so we didn't need it. We had great friends that helped set up and take down the chairs, the children in my family walked up the isle blowing bubbles, we got married under a big tree. It was great.

The Reception

We had the reception just down the street at the RA Centre. Overall a good place. Easy to deal with, close to the ceremony. We did a buffet style meal and my only regret was that I wish we had ordered more dessert. We ordered like 10 more "seats" then we had people, but I still don't know if it was enough. Everyone likes dessert...

The Flowers

One thing that Laura had a fairly specific requirement was that she wanted to have tulips in her bouquet. Most florists we spoke to just wanted Laura to change her mind. The reason why I think is that tulips don't do very well as a cut flower. They are all tight and small, but pretty soon they open up and get all droopy. And when I say "soon", I mean a couple of hours max. If you are prepared for that, it's fine. Laura dealt with Elmvale Florist. It's a pretty small shop, but we were really happy with the help and flowers we got there.

The Cake

We went with Judy McKenna of Kakes by Judy. We had a bit of a non-standard cake idea (tipsy layers). Most people we had talked about it said something like "Ohh... I have not done anything like that yet". Judy pulled out a picture of a cake she had made and said "you mean like this?". Awesome. I was against fondant icing until I tried hers. The cake sure was tasty. We did have some hick-ups with dealing with Judy though. Just some communication confusion which worked itself out before the wedding so it was all good.

The Photographer

I can't say enough nice things about Jennifer Ruiter of photo-tastic fame. Jennifer is a "capture the moment" rather than "take 10 minutes to create the moment" kind of person. We had a "getting to know you" photo shoot which I think made the wedding day a lot easier because we could understand what she wanted and she knew how to communicate with us. On the wedding day Jennifer became pseudo wedding coordinator as well. I feel that we owe a lot of the smoothness of the day to her.