Our Wedding - Vendors

Andrea and David's Wedding has happened.

Success!!! Everything was simply outstanding. Very few bad things happened. With regard to vendors, there were so many exceptional, great, beautiful jobs done. We'll put up photos of everyone's work soon. Please read below for our recommendations.
We did huge amounts of internet research to find appropriate prices to pay and find things that we wouldn't find shopping in our local area. Naturally, nearly every one of our vendors has a website.	For the most part we tried to choose vendors who were friendly and responsive as well as reasonably priced.

Shoes: ElanDanse. Sean Christopher gave some very personalized service to help me with buying my first and only pair of salsa shoes. I don't dance, much less salsa; I have foot problems and I thought professional dance shoes would offer more comfort for a day that is full of standing around.
While the shoes were excellent quality and cushy, my feet did not make it. I usually try to pay attention to how I'm walking to keep pain from developing, but there were so many things going on, and I had gotten about 10 hours of sleep over the past couple days before the big day, I didn't. However, when I switched to the red shoes for my Chinese dress, things got noticeably worse, so the salsa shoes were evidently some help.

Custom falconry glove:

Western Saddlery - white deerhide and, according to Pineo, very good quality. Prices are extremely good.
Doug Pineo - well known in the falconry community for his no-nonsense, durable gloves.

Jewelry:

Sun Jewelry
Ida's Gems Wedding ring
Jade Gifts - what you see is what you will get. This is not a place that sells "generic" junk jade, these are individual pieces. A nice lady, good communication and fast shipping.

Dress Maker: MyDay Bridal designed a really good dress for a really great price. There were difficulties, though, detailed on the other page. It looked great and fell well.

Dress material:

Silk Connection. Dupioni and habotai
Anatol's Bridal Outlet (BridalFabric)

Chinese-Tailor.com

Macy's

Birchcraft

Cyber Island Shells. My experience with Lynda and Richard Ardis is simply outstanding. They are great people with great products and really go out of their way to make things wonderful. I showed the favor to some friends and they declared, "That's a keeper." Keep professional, responsible, caring e-businesses in business!
All the ladies loved them. Not a single one was left behind.
GZI International. The only slightly unpleasant surprise was that the boxes the "flydragon" kites come in were bigger than we expected, about shoebox sized. A bit large to put on a place setting. But the kite once assembled is 32" long and 36" wide, so we should have anticipated that. And the guys loved them, even though they do not really fly. Again, not a single one was left behind.

Photographer: Gernot Wagner - a economics student who seems to have as good a photographic eye as the professionals.
Gernot turned out to be an excellent decision. Most, if not all, of the photographs where he was "on his own" were done with grace and flair, framed well and well-composed. The standard family, bridal party and couples pictures were competent.
Some difficulties ensued with Gernot's preference for natural light. I prefer it too, but the restaurant was fairly dark inside, causing underexposure in a yellowish cast. Many of the reception pictures needed some amount of adjustment to get them right.
A selection of the best photos can be found at the Ofoto website.

Entertainment: the Gee Yung Lion Dance team. $400. They did a classic show (2 lions tossing choy and giving us scrolls) which was somewhat constrained because the restaurant's chandaliers were low.

Flowers: Laura Sweeley Laura has been very professional, helpful and accomodating. Her references are extremely satisfied with her, and now I have offered myself as one. What she did was completely over the top. What initially attracted me to her was her straightforward web page, which included price ranges and lots of photos.
Laura turned out to be one of the best choices I made. Each centerpiece was a work of art, and the big pieces were rich, lush and simply stunning. Nothing was skimpy or spare-looking, and everything was full of roses and orchids. Care was taken, everything was tasteful, nothing looked cheap. Some pieces had a wire spiraled around each rose stem to ensure the heads would not droop. Each centerpiece was a little different, arranged so that it looked its best. In many ways that's better than having them all uniformly identical.
And the cake! When I walked in and looked at it: "My cake is so beautiful!" You could have heard me down in Santa Cruz. We had asked her to use tiny white Christmas lights underneath some tulle, gather it up at a few points and place clusters of flowers at each gather point. She did not just that but scattered petals and whole flowers all over the table. After we'd decided to raise the top layer of the cake on columns, I asked her to add 'a few flowers, maybe 3 or 4' under the top layer, and she quoted $20. I felt a little pinched, but gave the go ahead. Laura did it, decided it looked too spare and put as many flowers as she felt to make it look right. She does not go by a flower count. It's that sense of wanting things to look right that makes her a true floral artist. We got several nice extras that we hadn't asked for, things that required time and labor to create, for free.
A different florist offered me a centerpiece with a stargazer, 2 or 3 sprigs of dendrobiums and some curly willow for $35. Laura's centerpieces had the stargazer and curly willow, phaleonopses and dendrobuims - plus several roses, a few somethings with clusters of tiny bell shaped flowers and 2 of something else with clusters of quarter-sized flowers (sorry, I don't know the names) for the same $35. Great value! Outstanding work!

One of the large florals
A centerpiece

The bride's bouquet. Roses, phaels, stephanotis, and freesias around a cattelya. The little pearls in centers of the stephanotis were Laura's original touch.
One of the large florals (40" x 40") in my living room after everything was over. We had them in the church, then took them to the reception and placed them behind the cake table.
One of the centerpieces. Stargazer, phaels, roses, dendrobiums, cut fan palms, curly willow, 2 pheasant decks and at least 2 kinds of filler flowers in a clear plastic bowl with glass blobs.

Church: Community United Church of Christ (Congregational)

Reception: Iron Gate Restaurant. Voted Peninsula's Best Restaurant by the SF Chronicle.
The co-owner of the Gate, Kaveh, had a favorite phrase: "We can do that." They did a LOT. They gave us as much of the restaurant as we needed, put up artwork, managed the music. Apart from his own, this was the first wedding they had done, and I have to say they did it extremely well, as if they had lots of experience. The only criticism I could make was at the very beginning, there was a little lag and toasting drinks were not available at the time we were ready to do the toast, so we had to wait a few minutes. This is as much our fault as theirs, as we didn't anticipate fresh drinks would be needed; we'd assumed our guests would have the drinks they'd ordered when they arrived, but apparently many had not ordered any. (I admit we were a little concerned about having an hosted bar and hadn't told everyone.) Otherwise, timing was excellent, the food received tons of compliments, and when breakdown time came, the staff found everything, boxed it all in a fairly organized manner and got it all back to us. Not a single thing was misplaced. Any at-the-moment orders we had, the wait staff carried out immediately. People told me it was the best wedding they had ever been too, and one said it was better than her own. "Formal but fun," said our groomsman Randy. Some of our guests had never been in as classy a place as the Gate and the wait staff made them feel welcome.
Another lovely touch Kaveh did has a story to it. About a week before the wedding, David and I were still mixed about what kind of salad to give, so we had dinner there and did a "taste test". We judged the asparagus salad was a more attractive, showy presentation, with the asparagus and a clump of shrimp on top, but the Iron Gate salad tasted better so we chose that one. Our waiter that day apparently passed our words on to Kaveh, and when our reception salads came, we got an Iron Gate salad, but the shrimp that are usually mixed into that salad were placed on top!
This was a perfect, crowning touch, especially for my mother. The Cantonese word for shrimp is pronouced "ha," so they equate that food with laughter and joy. Shrimp is essential in a Chinese wedding. Placing it on top made happiness the most prominent thing. I doubt Kaveh knew this, but his senses steered him right and made things just that much better.

Candles: Bad experience with IWeddings.com. I ordered 3" ball candles in a burgundy color from iweddings.com, a Canadian website, on March 11th. Don't go there. First, I had trouble with their ordering system in Netscape (IE worked). They state on the confirmation email that someone would call within 24 hours to confirm the order. No one called or emailed. On the 18th, I emailed them to say I'd received no such phone call and that I'd like to know when I'd receive the order. A few hours later, I sent another email after noticing they had some white tapers for sale, saying I'd like to possibly add to the order and to please call. No response. Finally I phoned them (a toll call; their 800 number always gives a rapid-busy tone) and the woman told me she would have Matt Bossio get back to me. Didn't happen. Thursday/20, I called again and left a message on Bossio's voicemail. The next day I got an email from Bossio saying that their manufacturer wanted a minimum order of $150. What?!?!? Where did they say that on their website?! Nowhere!
I ordered candles from Candlemart.com and they arrived in 3 days. They sent me 3 autoresponse mails: one to acknowledge the order, one saying they had processed it, and the last to say it was shipped and here's the tracking number. Can't get better than that.

Cake: Copenhagen Bakery Also a Peninsula's Best in the SF Chronicle.
Adjectives that came to my ears: moist, fluffy, clean tasting, melt in your mouth. The filling was a good strong raspberry as we requested, the white chocolate frosting was not quite as strong as it was when we did the taste test. The decoration was beautiful and just as we asked for.

All photos by Gernot Wagner, except for flowers and glove.

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The bride's bouquet. Roses, phaels, stephanotis, and freesias around a cattelya. The little pearls in centers of the stephanotis were Laura's original touch.	One of the large florals (40" x 40") in my living room after everything was over. We had them in the church, then took them to the reception and placed them behind the cake table.	One of the centerpieces. Stargazer, phaels, roses, dendrobiums, cut fan palms, curly willow, 2 pheasant decks and at least 2 kinds of filler flowers in a clear plastic bowl with glass blobs.