Wedding Frills

This morning, I finally gathered all the ribbons, lace, flower I got the past week or two for my angbao box project! I hadn't done any craft project in ages, and was really excited about it! Though I knew I really shouldn't spend too much time on these frivolous things and tire myself out... but I just cldn't help it. It was something I HAD to do! I really cldn't bear buying those ugly angbao boxes with a wedding couple teddy pair and gaudy ribbons (yet cost a staggering $70!!) from the stores...

Very happy with my completed piece; as they go well with my vintage decor theme! :D

  my pretty craft materials...

 the decorated angbao box! (the box came plain, with just the angbao slot)

I laced the simple white guest book I got from Prints too!

If there is one word that can sum up how I feel this past week, it's the word "thankful". I feel extremely thankful to the lovely friends and family around me; who have so generously given up their free time and energy to help me with various bits of my wedding preps... I dun even know how to begin to describe this very warm, fuzzy feeling that I feel towards the ppl who have helped me in his/her own special way.. :)

2 more weeks (and only 5% of honeymoon planned bleah)! Wish I had enough leave to take the whole 2 weeks off!

Less than 3 weeks to the wedding and a million small things not done! And the million things is indirectly a consequence of my wanting to do things in a more DIY fashion.... :( I realised that it takes a good 20 - 25 min to fluff up one paper pom pom nicely, and this translates to minimum 400 min to fluff up my 20 pom poms! The time and effort that goes into this is... prob not commensurate with the meagre savings I got from asking my wedding florist to leave this to me... But it's too late, and I need to get them all fluffed up by this weekend, for handing over. Engaged mum to help out; but I think after two she already suffers from pom pom fluffing fatigue... I can do it decently well, but I just have no time! I suppose have to close one eye and fluff it up quickly and if it is done more uglily, so be it huh.

London!

I didn't really take many pictures in London; most of them were of food at Borough Market.. which had really high quality and enticing street/ market food. I loved the pretty pretty flowers at the dept store florists; why can't the roses at local florists come in more natural, neutral shades??

 

Poor rabbits :(

 

Dunno why they were selling portuguese egg tarts at Borough Market...

 

Extremely cute flower-pot bread! 

 

Colourful veggies :)

 

The beautiful great court at the British Museum

 

A pretty cool and inspiring quote at the museum

Cute flowers... Happy Valentine's dear friends!

It was a tiring but productive weekend! We FINALLY finished buying the lights for the house; and made some progress with sending out e-invites and penning down names and addresses for some hardcopy invites. We have slightly more than a month left now...

The actual house gate looks pretty much like what I envisioned it to be earlier! It has more blemishes when scrutinised close-up, but i suppose closing one eye for some trivial things will help me remain sane... 

Am on a short weekend work trip to London and there has unfortunately been a cold spell since last week. And so the weather these couple of days is looking pretty bad. It's snowing lightly outside and freezing cold! So though I had some time to spare in the evening just now; the temperature just made it too uncomfortable to walk down Oxford St for shopping. Shall hide myself in a museum or two tmr :(

I feel like I haven't written a proper blog post for some time... and sadly haven't written about anything else much besides home and wedding stuff. Even over this long CNY weekend, half of it has been kinda spent on wedding-related stuff... I dunno if this is a 'normal' ritual every couple goes through, but am starting to feel wasted having spent a disproportionate amt of time and effort online looking at wedding favors/ cake designs/ flower decor and such. I suspect it's just ME. And the growing bridezilla in me has repeatedly chosen these tasks over those that prob matter to me over the longer term... such as the acquisition of general knowledge through... reading of newspapers and keeping up-to-date with current affairs stuff, which my current job requires me to be.

Was also thinking about the wedding speech portion of dinner; and wondering why anyone wld want to say anything about me; and what can anyone possibly say...? Choosing WHO to give the one wedding speech for you is also a headachey decision to make. Perhaps the best solution is to have no other wedding speech aside from the one that D & I will give and save my dear friends from any trouble/ sleepless nights?

Need to remind myself not to get so carried away with making everything 'right' that I neglect to appreciate all the selfless things that my friends and family have and will be doing for me... I suppose weddings are still weddings and it's odd for a wedding to NOT revolve around the couple getting married. But just need to be mindful that it should also be a time to have fun, enjoy and appreciate the company of friends and family, so it wun end up being an overly self-glorifying, self-centred affair?

We stole into Timbre@Old School in broad daylight and took to the stage... Actually we didn't exactly plan to take shots in Timbre and were kinda taking shelter waiting for the temperamental rain to go away... but somehow the messiness looked kinda interesting and so we decided to give it a go :)

We received our pre-wedding shots today! There are quite a few nice ones to choose from, though I think we need to think up more creative shots than the nose-to-nose type of shots. I actually tried to do a "flags-line" put together with little pegs and twine the night before the photoshoot; it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped it will, but okie lah, the final product still looked relatively cute.

Here's our fun flags picture that spells out both our names, taken at Old School @ Mount Sophia :)

Sadly the weather did not hold up and so later part of shoot with the gowns had to be postponed to another day. It had better not rain again then! :( I got a little upset and slightly grouchy ard noon time when the intermittent drizzle got heavier and sky grew darker, cos it meant having to buy flowers again and wasting my balloons, on top of having to set aside another day/ half-day from my meagre balance of vacation leave for another shoot. Bridal studio also want us to pay $80 for re-steaming the gowns/suit that we didn't even wear!

Thankfully our photographer was pretty professional and his positive attitude prompted me to make the best of the rest of the half-day shoot for our casual shots. Think they turned out somewhat promising in the end. We will end up spending more $ for the shoot; but this episode also reminded me to look at the brighter side of things; and of the wonderful people around me (e.g. parents were nice about it and tried to comfort me a little, so did D... even though I'm sure D was also upset all cldn't go as originally planned)

Hai, these flowers (freesia + wax flowers) are now a little wasted sitting pretty at a vase at home ;(

Have been trying to prepare for wedding photoshoot next Tues and beauty comes with a pretty hefty price tag! Have to fork out more for more elegant flowers; french tips for manicure cost $5 more (and now some nail boutiques charge you CNY surcharge! what a way to rip ppl off) and pre-wedding shoot make-up costs quite a bit (with extension of MUA services chargeable at $100 per-hr with min of an hour)... It's so expensive to look nice :(

On lighter note, D & I prepared several props for some fun casual shots in casual wear...  Hopefully we will be blessed with good weather in this rainy season (the past week has been very promising) and that everything turns out well :)

My wedding florist must be quite disgusted with me 'cos I refused to pay $195 to rent 18 pom poms for a night and decided to go the harder way to look for my own online + ship them from the States + fluff them up myself and just pay her labour costs for putting them up at dinner. It ends up costing me about the same actually, BUT, I will at least get to keep all the pom poms! Haha I hope I will not regret this.

My sat mornings continue to be taken up by site meetings at new place, but things are starting to shape up and meetings with contractor (my uncle) are finally getting shorter. Yay! Both D and I are really relieved that my uncle turned out to be an excellent and extremely patient contractor - he also allocated his good workers to our project and they have retiled the entire first floor and the bathrooms quite nicely. People generally don't seem to hold construction workers in very high regard; but to me, good tiling seems to require quite a lot of skill, patience (and prob experience)! And I was really impressed by how they have managed to tile all the irregular outdoor portions of the house so nicely.

As part of DIY house-reno, I also attempted to design our own gate... and I am quite happy with my little gate design! But erm dunno if this can be translated that accurately into an actual gate design heh.

 

Today was a productive but tiring Monday off..  Day started at abt 930am, and ended at like 1030pm! Hmm hours-wise it was actually more xiong1 than work; but I ended up with some surprise finds/ bargains, including an off-the-rack dress I can wear for ROM, so I came home a broke but happy girl. Amidst all the shopping I even managed to catch a glimpse of the Abercrombie guys (in sweatpants only) outside the new A&F store along Orchard! The shoe-search was tough 'cos there just aren't that many choices out there within my budget; I managed to find something decently pretty, so if I cannot find anything else I'd prob just go with this pair.

It's so painful that I have to wake up at 715am tmr to go to work... :(

p/s: I have developed a newfound respect for good salespersons (who know their stuff and are not out to pressure you to buy a certain product/ model). It's also pretty inspiring to meet people who know their trade really well and look like they love what they do for a living..

I get easily stressed at work... so life is hard when it really doesn't have to be that tough :( And stress tires me out. Was stressed over two not super stressful things and ended up feeling very tired tonight/ yest night. I have another stress coming up... have to find wedding shoes in time for my gown fitting next Tues! Bleah...

Inspiring TED speech by Amy Purdy - double amputee and pro snowboarder, on how to draw inspiration from life's obstacles

Fridge Talk

I never thought that buying a fridge can be so complicated and mentally + physically exhausting. After several rounds of browsing in the past couple of weeks (we have been eyeing some Fisher & Paykel ones), we ended up buying a pretty big but reasonably priced two-door LG stainless steel one tonight. We hung around the fridge display area for more than 2 hrs, making repeated rounds to compare the potential candidates, their number of NEA ticks (ie. annual energy consumption) and agonising over the amt of premium we were prepared to pay for chio-ness (For the F&P fridges, the chio-er stainless steel ones cost abt $400 more than their plainer sandstone/white counterparts...)

Our purchase was something we totally did not set out to buy; but LG apparently produces good, high-tech energy-saving fridges. Hopefully we made the right choice; even if we didn't, I can regret later cos I can minimally sleep well tonight knowing that my fridge is not gg to be camouflaged by my kitchen wall :)

[p/s: I think I actually mentioned this in an earlier post - In our pursuit for chio kitchen appliances, we had initially set out to buy a SMEG fridge. But the poor space efficiency and exorbitant price tag quickly led us to strike it off our shortlist :P]

Need to snap out of a very negative outlook/ attitude at work :( Somehow many things seem quite pointless and bureaucratic; and in turn motivation level has plunged significantly of late. I have also been less nice to boss lately; including giving slightly sian3 looks when informed of the need to present stuff at dept planning sessions etc. Bleah... On personal front, life is pretty hectic with renov and wedding stuff to think about every week. I think my tendency to want to be perfectionist about the slightest details also makes life more tiring for myself... Perhaps need to learn to let go and enjoy the moment more, at work and outside work!

The highlight of my work day was a roundtable discussion chaired by my CEO with visiting CSC fellow & co on the "evergreen" topic of housing affordability. My office and another section in my dept kinda co-organised the event so I got to sit in the session as a back-bencher... While our visitors from the States left us with some 'food for thought' comments towards the end of the session, the "star" of the discussion was actually my CEO cos she was really really zai. I don't think I've ever had a boss so outstanding and clear and eloquent in delivering her arguments/views... She's also really skilful in disagreeing in an agreeable and sensible way. Have also found her very humble and approachable despite her very impressive achievements. Such an inspiration for ppl working with her :)

 

Christmas colors on the sunset deck of our junk at hazy Halong Bay

I didn't like Hanoi very much to be honest, and this time round we also had a series of unlucky/ unpleasant little incidents on the trip... :( Sadly my experiences with Vietnam haven't been that great; also ended up with like a bad throat/ nose due to the bad air, so I was pretty thankful to be back in clean and green SG heh.

Later part of this week was split btwn some bridal stuff and house renovation business. I got rather upset with the bridal studio's pricing policy for my made-to-measure evening gown (design with too many folds = $, two diff colors on gown = $, extra bow = $, cheongsam cut = $, extra crystals =$$$). On hindsight, I shld have asked more questions before taking up the package, but oh well sometimes you really wouldn't have known better beforehand. 

Quite a bit of the old house have also been stripped free of old wall/floor tiles; and it was interesting to see all the hidden pipes/ wires beneath the false ceilings and such.. This evening we also visited a SMEG showroom to checkout their bright and retro-looking fridges; but concluded that chio things can be rather impractical... so will prob give up idea of buying a very chio fridge and in turn try to settle for a relatively chio but more functional and reasonably-priced one. The Harvey Norman salesman at Millenia Walk also gave us a very informative overview on induction cookers, ovens and dishwashers... but need to do more homework and research bit more on which brands are more reliable/ durable... The 3 main contenders for the kitchen appliances (esp a good oven!) I want to get are BOSCH vs BRANDT vs ELECTROLUX... recommendations are most welcome :)