My Favorite Bride of the Week

Well, ok...she's my only bride of the week, but she really did rock.

Yesterday was Saturday. Saturdays mean weddings to me. This Saturday was Jim & Jenn. I knew Jenn was going to be a dream to work with the minute we sat down at Starbucks 9 months ago for our initial meeting. The girl is just laid back, cool, calm, collected, and WAY more into her marriage than she was the wedding itself. Exactly what it's supposed to be about.

Her big day was yesterday and she did so much work herself that turned out so beautiful. I'll be honest with you, not every bride can pull off doing things herself. You have to be organized, dedicated to the projects, and have a bit of a creative/crafty side if you want it all to turn out. Jenn hit it right on. With a color palate of pinks and green, everything complimented each other to true perfection.

I think one of the highlights for me was walking into the bride's room at the church before the ceremony was supposed to start, ushering her bridesmaids out to take their places and standing behind Jenn as she looked in the mirror to take one final glimpse of her single self. She looked at me in the mirror and said "Holy shit Danica, I'm getting married today!" and then displayed the biggest smile ever. You sure are hon, you sure are.

While there was a pesky church coordinator (who also doubled as the soloist) who was training a new church coordinator, all was well. I think I was only snipped at twice. Not too bad.

Once Jenn & Jim were hitched, I took everything from the church to the reception venue, Sheraton 4 Points - Milwaukee Airport (soon to be the Wyndham). This is where everything gets sticky. As great as Jenn is, she just didn't have time the final week to to get me the things I needed, including a floor plan with table assignments, a revised To-Do List for set-up, etc. But I had complete faith in myself that I could pull this off and that Jenn would be fine with however it turned out. She had even indicated on her first To-Do List to use my judgement on a few things so I figured we were on the same page.

However, the info that the Sheraton had and the info that I had were very different. My head table indicated two tiers of 6, their's indicated two tiers; 1 of 4, 1 of 8. Uh-oh. While I showed the Sheraton the notes provided by our client, they refused to change anything because Jenn had signed off on their copy. I totally understand this because at the end of the day the set-up falls on the Sheraton, not me. Signatures are signatures. While I tried to fight for my bride, it was a losing battle. On top of all this, I get to witness a manager downright belittle an employee for not setting up a few tables correctly. Granted, he was right and I was the one that pointed it out to him, but I never expected him to call his set-up guy an IDIOT over it. Good lord. I had some choice words with this manager and plan on writing a letter to the General Manager of that hotel, someone that I happen to know very well. This is why you should always be on your best behavior in front of strangers...you never know who's watching and what they know.

The rest of set-up went well, Le Cakery did an amazing job and were so detailed with their beautiful cake set-up. Very impressive. I finally got to meet Eric, the owner of DJ's Unlimited and catch up with him. I had to make a few executive decisions on my portion of set-up including not using the rose petals around the centerpieces because they would have just been overkill and taken away from her beautiful tables. There weren't enough lotto scratch-off favors for every seat because the Sheraton had to overset since they weren't provided with how many people would be at each table...again, I improvised. All in all, it was a great day and though I have to detail out some things for Jenn in an email today as a follow-up, I think she was pleased. I know both Mom's were and that's usually the hard part!


Oh, there were also floral snafu's, namely that the lovely florist refused to drop anything off at the Sheraton, meaning I had to transport everything, which is not a big deal at all...it's just strange. The other part was that she completely mixed up the colors of the flowers. They looked amazing and no one would ever know except for Jenn and I, but it was a big mistake. Did I mention the boutineers and corsages ALL had brown edges on some of the petals? I was plucking petals like mad in order to make them look good. Really a shame and definitely something I need to let the bride know about since it's probably worth looking into receiving some type of compensation for.

Bring on Liz's wedding next! :)