Sample Sale @ White Toronto

White Toronto is a beautiful Yorkville dress shop that’s generally a bit pricey for your typical common sense bride. But this Friday and Saturday (October 2 and 3), it’s having a sample sale.
Here are the details:


WHITE HOT SAMPLE SALE!
Two Days Only!
October 2-3, 2009

The big day is on its way and there's still time to fall in love—a second time, of course.

Save up to 70% at White, Toronto on more than 80 designer bridal gowns. Including a limited number of Monique Lhuillier bridal gown samples, plus deigns from Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, Badgley Mischka, Jenny Lee, Nicole Miller and more. We will also be featuring a collection of special occasion and bridesmaid sample dresses.

Space is limited, so call now to book your appointment.
(416) 849-9196 or info@whitetoronto.com

White Toronto
19 Hazelton Avenue, Toronto

We Need A Photographer

We’re now ten months away from Shawn and mine’s wedding date. According to various wedding planning sites, we should book our photographer in the next couple of months. So, anyone know a Toronto-based photographer who’s experienced at shooting weddings, is good with people who hate having their photos taken (and are completely unphotogenic), is fairly affordable and who takes eye-catching and unique shots?

I must admit I am not a photography person. I like my artwork to be something that I could never imagine and most photography can’t be classified as that. But I understand that photography is a necessary part of any wedding and while I don’t think Shawn and I are really looking forward to the photo portion of the day, we do want to have great photos that we can flip through years from now.

At the same time, we’re not up to blowing $5,000 on a photography package. We want someone who will come in, take our pictures, maybe touch up a few of the better ones and then give us a CD. I know you can get all sorts of fancy photo packages but really, there’s nothing common sense about spending $500 (or higher) on some glittering album that you’ll look at twice and will then be chewed on by the dog.

We’ll likely print off a few favourites for our own homemade album, stick a bunch on Facebook and use one particularly flattering one on our postcard-style thank you cards. Maybe Shawn will have a photo in his office and Christmas 2010 will likely see various relatives getting framed photos as Christmas gifts. But that’ll be about it for our photos. So maybe we don’t want a photographer whose bread and butter is weddings. We want someone who won’t push those fancy packages on us and who will take amazing photos regardless of my statements on $500 wedding photo albums.

If you’ve got any names, please leave them in the comments section or email them to me at wedtoblog@gmail.com

Thanks!

Meet Charlotte: Our Bridesmaid Expert

The other day I met with Charlotte, a friend who’s also been in 13 wedding parties. Over the next few months, she’ll be sharing some of the insight she’s gathered from being involved in all those weddings.

Charlotte’s biggest piece of advice for brides is to have clear idea of what you what and then accurately communicate it to your maids. She says that many of the weddings she’s been involved with begin with the bride being laid backed.

”She starts off with letting the bridesmaids make the decisions,” says Charlotte but eventually, as the bride sees that those decisions aren’t matching her vision, her relaxed nature changes. “That’s when things get bitchy.”

A common mistake is for the bride to tell the maids that they can wear whatever dress they want as long as the colour or fabric matches. Charlotte’s been involved in multiple weddings where this approach has led to alterations and new dress purchases. While she didn’t sound bitter about this, I know I would be if that happened to me.

Keep this from happening to you maids by together picking a common dress design and fabric. This doesn’t mean that everyone has to match but instead, that all the designs work together. Charlotte suggests picking necklines that work for each girl but keeping the rest of the dress the same. “That usually looks really flattering.”

Charlotte points out that you need to consider all details: open-toed shoes or closed; hair up or down; dangling earrings or studs. Once you know what you want, tell your girls and only let them make their own choices if you trust their style.

She tells the story about one wedding she was in where the girls where allowed to wear whatever necklace they wanted. The bride thought that her maids would wear a small floating diamond or pearl necklace and that’s what almost all of them ended up wearing except for one girl, who was a bit of a hippy. She showed up in a large, three-strand necklace. “It looked good,” says Charlotte but when the girl was lined up with the other maids, the hippy necklace really stood out. “The little things are really noticeable,” she says.

Having a plan for your maids look doesn’t mean you’re a Bridezilla. It just means that you’re organized and know that being a little bossy now can prevent a big headache in the future.

5 Ways To Up The "Wow" Factor

TheKnot.com just posted “10 Ways to Wow your Wedding Guests”. Some of their ideas are certainly “wowing” though not very “common sense” (such as ending the night with fireworks) while others are a bit dated (“Plan Out the First Dance”) or obvious (“Pick a ceremony spot with a gorgeous view...”).

Here are my five wow-your-guest-ideas that are actually wowing and realistic.

1. Live music during the ceremony – A harpist or string quartet always classes things up. Check out local music schools, or the Royal Conservatory of Music, to locate talented but affordable young musicians.

2. A variety of good liquor –And by that I mean have on hand such brands as Kahlua, Sour Puss and Jagermeister. Worried about the extra cost? Then cheap out a bit on your bar stock (so say, Polar Ice instead of SKYY vodka)and use the savings to help pay for this new stock of booze.

3. Tall centrepieces – Height always impresses people so up the wow factor in your decor, by going with centrepieces that tower three feet tall or more. And no, taller doesn’t necessary mean pricier. Tall vases can be picked up for a few bucks at the dollar store and can be filled with decorative branches, long grasses and even feathers (if you want to go that route). See more ideas here.

4. No speeches – Speeches are almost always the least favourite part of any wedding so ditch (at least limit their numbers and lengths) them and leave your guests smiling.

5. On-Site Photo Printing – Okay, maybe not the cheapest idea but if you already have a laptop and photo printer, it’s a doable one. Simply set up your laptop and printer off to the side and include clear instructions on how people can upload and print their photos right there. If you want, you can also use this set up to collect plenty of candid photos for yourself.

Wedding Show This Weekend

Just a reminder that there’s a big wedding show this upcoming weekend, over at the Convention Centre.

Canada’s Bridal Show
September 25 - 27
Metro Toronto Convention Centre
255 Front St. W., Toronto
905-264-7000

Tickets are $15 but you can find a $5 off coupon over here.

I checked this show out back in January. For brides who are looking and ready to book vendors, it’s worth checking out. You can read up on my bridal show experience right here.

I’m not going this time around but I think Shawn and I will check out the January 2010 edition. The show usually has really good deals on men’s wear so I think we might get Shawn’s tux from there.

How To Save $200 A Month

Really, you can do it.

1. Restrict both of you to one night out a week = at least $50
2. Live to learn with the basic cable package = at least $30
3. And while you’re in that mindspace, examine your phone and internet bills; even lowering those by $10 helps = $10
4. Discover that most drugstore products are just as good, if not better than MAC, Clinique and other pricy brands = $50
5. You know what, just don’t go into Sephora (or your Store of temptation), just learn to walk on by it = at least $50
6. Stop buying candy, pop and coffee = $20 (added bonus: weight loss)
7. Start clipping coupons with the help of the web = oh, let’s be modest with $20 (though you could save a lot more)
8. And stop buying items such as DVDs, books and video games that you’ll only ever pay attention to once = $25
9. Drive the speed limit, on properly inflated tires = $5 (or more)
10. Don’t drive? Then make sure you always have tokens in your bag = $5
11. Learn how to give yourself at-home manicures and pedicures = $25
12. Going out to buy a specific item? Then bring just enough cash to cover it = well, it really depends what store you’re headed to

Look at that, we’re easily over $200. Okay, so not all of these numbers apply to you and yeah, they are only estimates but at least this gives you the sense that yes, you can, with minimal pain, save $2,400 a year.

Of course, for many weddings $2,400 is enough to cover the flowers and maybe the favours so yeah, we’ll definitely be returning to this topic in the near feature.

Don't Fall Into This Trap...

In my last post I mentioned how, if you’re having a $25,000 wedding and you have a year to plan for it, it you need to put aside about $2,000 a month to make sure that your wedding is a debt-free process. So how are you going to do that?

Well, in all honesty, you’re probably not going to be able to save that all of that amount and you likely will have a bit of wedding debt that, hopefully, you can pay off using the money that people give you as a gift. But don’t fall for the common belief that a wedding can pay for itself; this idea has trapped more than a few brides into years of debt.

Instead, count on between 10-20 percent of your wedding budget being reimbursed by your guests. What figure you go with depends on your wedding budget and your guest list. If your wedding is running you $25,000 and you’re inviting just over a 100 people who are, for the most part, gainfully employed, you’re probably safe to go with 20 percent.

But if you’re throwing some kind of lavish event and/or your guests have been hard hit by the recession (or maybe you’re throwing the sixth wedding they’ve been to this year), lower that figure to 10 percent.

Whatever you do, don’t do math like this:
100 guests X $200 = $20,000, meaning you only have to come up with $5,000

I know it’s tempting to imagine this scenario (or even better, one where you come out ahead) but don’t do it. If you do, you could find yourself in a nice, little debt-hole after you count up the checks and discover that those 100 guests were mostly couples/families who mostly gave stuff/best wishes/a group gift of an overpriced vacuum that you’ll never use.

So now that you’ve figured out how much you can allow as debt, how do you make up the difference?

Where To Start Saving

After the emotional turmoil that a wedding can create, the financial aspect of wedding planning is probably the most stressful. Thankfully, there is an easy way to start saving for your big day: set up a tax-free high-interest savings account.

Why set one of these up? Well, for one thing, creating a separate “wedding” account makes it easier to track your wedding spending and saving. Using a tax-free, high-interest account will make your money work harder for you (before interest rates dropped dramatically last year, my high-interest account made me hundreds of extra dollars) and provide you with a tax-shelter on the first $5,000 saved. And, using a saving account makes it a bit harder for you to access your money, a feature that any shopaholics/impulse spenders are going to want to take note of.

Shawn and I use an ING account because it’s free, easy-to-use and comes with a number of useful calculator tools. But most major Canadian banks offer some kind of tax-free, high-interest accounts. Just make sure to do your research before you open one up because some accounts require a minimum balance and charge a monthly fee, two features you are going to want to avoid.

One feature however, that you’re going to want is automatic transfers. ING calls this their “Automatic Savings Program” and it lets us move a fixed amount of money from our regular checking account over to our ING account on a regular basis. You can choose weekly, bi-weekly or monthly options and the amount being moved can easily be changed.

Setting this feature up makes saving significantly easier and less painful than manually moving the money over. And, because it’s being moved over into its own account, it’s “out of sight, out of mind”.

So how much should you be regularly be saving? Well, let say you’ve budgeted $25,000 for your wedding, you have a year to save for it and you’re starting with an initial savings of $1,000. You’re going to want to put away $2,000 a month to meet your goal and not go into debt (the interest you earn will give you a $400 safety cushion, based a three percent interest rate).

Yeah, that’s a lot. We’ll talk a bit about how you can reach that number over future entries.

Looking For Your Dress?

Then you’re going to want to pick up the fall/winter issue of The Knot. It is packed with hundreds and hundreds of dress photos, all alphabetically organized by the designer’s name. Each photo contains a short description that includes the fabric type, the colour options and a price range.

It lists plenty of stunning dresses for under $1,500 US and while true, this is an American magazine and not all of the dresses it contains are available in Canada, it will give you lots of ideas and clippings that you can take on your shopping trips.

I know The Knot is often associated with the Bridezilla-approach to wedding planning but this issue is truly one that nearly any bride would find useful. In addition to all the wedding dress shots, it also contains dozens of bridemaids, mother-of-the-bride and flower girl outfits, as well as honeymoon ideas and general wedding how-to’s.

So if you buy only one wedding magazine this season, let it be this one. I’m sure you’ll refer to it over and over and over.

FAQs: Invites #1

Sorry for the lack of entries; the past week has been very busy for me (though not with wedding stuff). To make up for my lack of posts, here's a very practical entry below that looks at a few frequently asked invite-related questions. I have more of these FAQ-type posts in the works and plan to post another one this weekend.

If you have a Toronto-wedding-related question (though please nothing etiquette or conflict related), please send it to wedtoblog@gmail.com

Q: When should I send out my invites?
A: The usual answer to this is eight-six weeks, giving a RSVP deadline that's three weeks prior to the wedding date. However, if you're a bit of a control freak and/or if you're dealing with guests who are travelling a long way, I would recommend sending at least some of those invites out earlier, say 10 weeks.

Also, if any of your guests are going to have to take more than a day or two off to get to your wedding, give them at least three months notice. You can do this with a "save-the-date" card or tell them in a more casual way, either way do give them plenty of heads up time or else they might use up their vacation days before your wedding comes around.

Q: I'm trying to save a bit of cash by buying invites that won't require extra postage. What is a "regular-sized" invite?
A: A standard letter needs to be 30 grams or under. The current going rate for a standard letter is $0.54.

Q: And what if I have my heart set on oversized invites, then what will I be paying? A: Let’s get the answer from this handy chart, made by Canada Post.

Q: Can I make personalized stamps here in Canada?
A: Yes, Canada Post does offer this fun service. For details, head over here. $40 will get you forty, regular stamps and prices do get a bit cheaper the more stamps you buy.