I laugh about this experience whenever I speak of it.
--
1 year before the wedding when I was thinking straight and tak gila, i told lhy that I wanted a frills-free wedding. "The most important thing is really the programmes, so let's focus on that".
He agreed with me.
1/2 a year passed and I was engaged, and online reading about how brides DIY-ed their wedding favours + all wedding decor. Everything looked so pretty. Reading about brides sharing about their customised wedding as a personal touch and as a show of the the couples personality resonated with me.
And in that gila moment at 3am, I decided to do the same as well.
I knew this wasn't gonna sit well with lhy. He is the most chill person in the whole world, and always thinking of ways to meet objectives fast. He found the proposition ridiculous and we got into a minor disagreement.
After we cooled off, he eventually understood when I explained how I yearned to take this on as a project cos I love to DIY so much, and I set the context that I wasn't expecting him to help out much as I had an army of friends whom I knew would be interested to help out.
With that, the late nights began.
It started with a pinterest board:
Next I decided on the number that I needed. Since we were undecided on the number then (in April), I planned for more (Around 300 then). I shortlisted a few favours that were feasible, given I had to teach my friends how to do them. I picked those that were easily to assemble, and of course also went on to Taobao to work out the cost price of the favours. Purchasing the materials was a procurement project in itself. Evernote was my best friend, and after 2 - 3 batches of shipping, all the stuff finally got shipped over!
This was in July. After discussion with my sister, I quickly set up a facebook group with all my friends, and set 2 dates for sweat shop production of the following favours:
i actually had other favours in mind, like painted ceramic coasters and cups but as it inched closer to the date and we had so much things to complete, we decided to shelf the plans. i now have many many plain ceramic cups at home which i might paint one day for the new house.
anyway, because of this huge ass project i roped in my girlfriends to help:
--
1 year before the wedding when I was thinking straight and tak gila, i told lhy that I wanted a frills-free wedding. "The most important thing is really the programmes, so let's focus on that".
He agreed with me.
1/2 a year passed and I was engaged, and online reading about how brides DIY-ed their wedding favours + all wedding decor. Everything looked so pretty. Reading about brides sharing about their customised wedding as a personal touch and as a show of the the couples personality resonated with me.
And in that gila moment at 3am, I decided to do the same as well.
I knew this wasn't gonna sit well with lhy. He is the most chill person in the whole world, and always thinking of ways to meet objectives fast. He found the proposition ridiculous and we got into a minor disagreement.
After we cooled off, he eventually understood when I explained how I yearned to take this on as a project cos I love to DIY so much, and I set the context that I wasn't expecting him to help out much as I had an army of friends whom I knew would be interested to help out.
With that, the late nights began.
It started with a pinterest board:
Next I decided on the number that I needed. Since we were undecided on the number then (in April), I planned for more (Around 300 then). I shortlisted a few favours that were feasible, given I had to teach my friends how to do them. I picked those that were easily to assemble, and of course also went on to Taobao to work out the cost price of the favours. Purchasing the materials was a procurement project in itself. Evernote was my best friend, and after 2 - 3 batches of shipping, all the stuff finally got shipped over!
just look at the size of the shipment. the poor skinny singpost guy lugged them all the way up. it was like 30kg.
it was super dusty coz taobao uses these recycled packing materials. it was a horrible few months.
This was in July. After discussion with my sister, I quickly set up a facebook group with all my friends, and set 2 dates for sweat shop production of the following favours:
#1 tea in a bottle
scoop tea into a bottle, and tie tags to them!
difficulty level: 1/10
#2 organic lip balm
lip balm with beeswax, coconut oil and honey :) My sis eventually did all of this in the end as this had to be done much closer to the wedding as it was organic and had a short shelf life.
difficulty level: 8/10 because she spent a sleepless night trying to get the right proportion of beeswax and coconut oil. poor girl was melting and remelting it.
#3 hand stamped/painted/cloth bound notebooks
either paint, hand stamp, or cloth cover the white note books
difficulty level:
painting - 7/10
hand stamp - 5/10
cloth cover - 5/10
#4 hand-stamped/painted tote bags
using foam to create stamps to stamp on the tote bags. fabric paint!
difficulty level: 5/10
#5 hand-stamped/painted drawsting bags
similar to #4, using foam to create stamps to stamp on the bags. fabric paint!
difficulty level: 5/10
#6 leather key chains
cut leather up and hammer bolts to create leather key chains! on that day, to provide metal alphabets for people to monogram their initials on the leather.
difficulty level: 5/10
#7 postcards - I designed 3 sets of postcards and Novina my LG mate designed another set. This was meant to be the buffer as we could print as many sets of postcards we wanted and the extra effort was marginal.
#8 chinese calligraphy paper weights was done by my very talented papa cos he is also crafty and wanted to help :)
i actually had other favours in mind, like painted ceramic coasters and cups but as it inched closer to the date and we had so much things to complete, we decided to shelf the plans. i now have many many plain ceramic cups at home which i might paint one day for the new house.
anyway, because of this huge ass project i roped in my girlfriends to help:
Look at the poor conditions that i subject my friends to. In the end, lhy had to be roped in to help coz there was simply too many things to do.
they ended up doing what they did best, and miss qinpei was best at fixing up leather keychains.
my poor friends!
this is a glimpse of their hard work:
haha yes i also used cloth leftover from making my cheongsam.
all packed up and ready to be sent to SICC!
i wanted the postcards to be a little more generic but still told something about us. designed them using illustrator:
Set I:
i just thought brush strokes, black and white + chinese + minimalistic was nice.
Set II: things we love doing
set III: places we've been to (feat. photos we took on the trips)
i can't seem to find the digital copies for novina's designs! but they were amazing too <3
anyway, the favours were a huge hit, and some people told me papa's calligraphy paper weights were the first to go (as he had predicted!). some people also said they were very sad that they didnt manage to monogram their leather keychains coz the stencils were missing under a whole pile of logistics! but many are still using the keychains, tote bags, etc, which i'm so glad! there were only postcards left over but it was only we printed extra just in case.
looking back, if i had to do it all over again, i would definitely have taken out the favours that needed so much painting - like the tote bags coz they took a long time for us to finish them! i would focus on the favours that were easy, like cloth masking the plain notebooks, packing more tea, more lip balm, more leather keychains. also to announce that there were favours at the dinner, cos some people didn't know there were and missed out on getting theirs! all in all it was time consuming but duper fun.
