愛-Vey! All in the Details

Now that you've seen documentation of our ginormous challah and crazy hora, how about a few details that are less "holy crap" and (hopefully) a little more "ooh la la"?

Remember the papercut table numbers we commissioned from Etsy seller papercutdiecut? They stood out beautifully in the $1 acrylic frames I purchased from the Christmas Tree Store.

I loved the shadows cast by the pinspots and the votives. The latter were ordered from Candles4less.com for $4.91 a dozen. And on the left is a close-up of our gocco'd menus. I'm happy I decided at the last minute to bling them up with a gem; it added a little somethin' somethin', you know?

The menus were tucked into napkins and garnished with orchids. The purple pouches contained our his-and-her keychain favors. The tags, which say "thanks" in English, Chinese, and Hebrew, were printed on my home printer.

Here's the guest's eye view of the place settings. As you can see, we decided to forego fancy chivaris and use the hotel's regular ballroom chairs. Angel recommended our getting pinspotting on all of the tables and amber and purple uplights. I loved the romantic and warm glow they cast over the room.

Kate Baker created some seriously gorgeous tall centerpieces for the three long family tables. The glass hurricane vases were filled with miniature plums and pears. "Capping" each urn was a collar of the chinoiserie fabric I got in China and some pink hydrangeas, which served as a base for a generous spray of cherry blossoms.

I told Kate that I wanted each of the tables to look lavish, but a bit wild . . . sort of like a lazy afternoon garden luncheon in a crumbling Italian villa, where the lady of the house has gambled away most of the family fortune and is forced to make do with tarnished antiques and fallen fruits found on the grounds. She did a spectacular job translating my whimsical musings into reality by creating table vignettes with trailing vines, miniature fruits, and loose blooms.

For an extra dash of whimsy, she also embedded lilacs into the hurricanes and attached amethyst and clear crystals to the cherry blossom sprays.

The rest of the tables featured short centerpieces in bronze urns. Kate created loose, organic arrangements in bronze urns of varying shapes, for an Anthropologie-esque "found object" look.

To tie the short centerpieces together with the tall ones, Kate created similar vignettes with vines and miniature fruits on all the round tables.

If you're like me, flowers are nice but food is better! Since I'm all about choice, we opted to have a dessert buffet and cupcakes in lieu of a plated dessert or wedding cake.

The buffet included cheesecakes on skewers (those ugly but oh-so-delicious purple discs on sticks!), s'mores shooters, mango with sticky rice, lemon meringue tarts, purple macarons, and miniature bread puddings. [I'm sorry, I just drooled on my keyboard.]

Our cupcakes were from Vanilla Bake Shop, and they came in an array of delectable favors, including red velvet and meyer lemon raspberry. I thought they were awesome at the tasting, and I can only imagine how delicious they would have been at our wedding . . . . Alas, Mr. HC and I were so busy toasting and dancing and schmoozing that we didn't get to the dessert table in time for the cupcakes. We fed each other lemon meringue tarts for our "cake cutting photo" instead!

** Tip: Chinese ladies love to pile dozens of desserts on huge plates "for the table." At the end of the night, after the dessert buffet was depleted, the tables with our Chinese friends and family still had platters full of dessert. If you're ever in a buffet situation with little Asian ladies, run, jostle, elbow . . . do what you gotta do to get to the buffet table in front of them or else your little tummy will be very empty and very sad!

This was such a fun post to write, since I got to pull together creations I had discussed in previous posts and show you how they turned out! Sadly, this also means that my recaps are almost over. I'll discuss fashion details in my next post, but after that I might be d.o.n.e. Sniffles.

Photos by Leigh Miller Photography, Luna Photography, and Della Chen Photography.