Venue
Caterer
Bakery
Photography
Officiant
Stationery
Music
Day of Coordinator
Attire
Etc.
Florist
The inside of Woodlawn Manor is quite small, so we would recommend a good "plan B" in case of rain if you expect more than 50 guests at your wedding and are planning a seated reception outdoors. Also, there are not many outdoor electrical outlets, so we ended up needing lots of extension cords for any lighting or music equipment.
{photos above by my brother-in-law and bridesmaid}
{photos by Punam Bean}
However, we had been warned in advance that the owner/head chef, Hernan, has a reputation for being a bit difficult to work with. Some other couples told us they received some inaccurate estimates while finalizing the menu and rental details before their wedding. We felt that the quality of the food outweighed any potential personality issues - and we were ultimately really satisfied with the quality of their food and service. I would still definitely recommend BasiKneads, but would advise other couples to pay close attention to any proposals/estimates and resolve any issues as soon as they come up.
{photos by Punam Bean}
CakeLove - U Street Bakery
Instead of a traditional wedding cake, we ordered three cakes from CakeLove - a local DC institution that makes some of the yummiest cakes imaginable. Our choices included a Brown Velvet cake (chocolate with cream cheese icing), a German Chocolate cake with coconut-infused vanilla buttercream icing and toasted coconut flakes, and a Lemon Swirl cake (vanilla cake with alternating layers of vanilla buttercream and lemon curd) - Yum! We didn't even think of ordering our wedding cake from anyone else - and in terms of both cost and taste it was totally the right decision.
{photos via CakeLove}
{photo by my brother-in-law}
Cantor Jan Morrison - Columbia Jewish Congregation
There were some communication problems in the first few months after we made the decision to work with Cantor Morrison. A couple of e-mails never received a response, some stretching out a couple of months. Ultimately, it wasn't a huge deal, and Cantor Morrison appears to have improved her e-mail communication methods since then. I would still highly recommend Cantor Morrison to any Jewish or interfaith couples. My only advice would be to keep track of the communication flow and don't be shy about sending several e-mails in order to get a response.
For our invitations, we worked with a small husband and wife design company called Cricket Press to design these custom letterpress invitations. Our invitation suite included the main letterpress 5 x 7" invitation, a separate screen-printed fold-out enclosure with itinerary and directions information, as well as a detachable rsvp postcard.
Cricket Press offered the best value for the kind of invitation package that we were looking for, particularly for a letterpress studio. Cricket Press was both incredibly affordable and willing to work with us to create a truly unique and beautiful invitation that completely suited our wedding style.
{image via Cricket Press}
For our seating cards, we worked with the lovely Laura Hooper. We decided to use place cards, instead of escort cards, since we used two rows of long tables rather than individual round tables. We used Laura's "Ella" font, which was perfect for our informal and slightly whimsical wedding.
Laura's work is amazing, and I absolutely loved our place cards. I thought calligraphy was going to be prohibitively expensive, but her rates are quite reasonable - she also provided the card stock, which was great since it was one less thing that we had to worry about. Laura was incredibly personable, professional, and responsive - our place cards were in our hands only three days later!
{photo by Punam Bean}
Ceremony - our friend Mark!
Music was not high on our priority list - and as a result we needed something free, or as close to it as we could get. Luckily, one of my best friends is an accomplished guitar player, and played the ceremony music for us as a wedding present. Mark did a really great job - just as good if not better than any string quartet that we could have hired, and the guitar probably suited our music choices better anyway. Plus, having a good friend play the music made our ceremony even more personal.
Reception - iPod!
We didn't have the budget for a live band, but couldn't fathom the idea of relinquishing control to a DJ. We put together a playlist with a mixture of jazz, soul, some Beatles, 80s, and modern indie and pop music the night before the wedding. We used a Bose speaker unit that plays music from your iPod and just hooked it up and let it play throughout the reception. We think it worked out really well, and the sound on the Bose unit was surprisingly good for outdoor use!
Jasmine was a complete lifesaver on the day of our wedding! With so many DIY elements in our wedding, we really needed a DOC to pull the whole thing off. Jasmine was totally on top of everything on the day of the wedding, arrived before any of our other vendors and made sure all of our decorations were set up, ran the processional of the ceremony, and organized the breakdown (and return transport of all of our wedding items) at the end of the evening. Jasmine provides only day-of and wedding rehearsal coordination, but I would strongly recommend her to any couple in the DC area.
We found the absolute perfect dress for our flower girl at West Village Kids.
Myra from Twigs and Honey made a headband for our flower girl to wear during the ceremony. Myra was an absolute joy to work with - and our niece loved her headband!
We used favor boxes from "I Need a Favor from Kate" and chocolate truffles from Whole Foods as our favors. We loved the selection of paper patterns and box patterns, and Kate herself was incredibly responsive and even checked with me when she found out that our paper pattern was on backorder. The chocolates from Whole Foods were incredibly yummy, relatively inexpensive, and we were able to pick them up the week before our wedding and then keep them in the fridge until the day of the wedding. Favors weren't a huge priority for us, but we were able to find something relatively inexpensive that proved to be a fun element in our wedding.
Unfortunately, because the paper patterns only come in a certain size ream, Kate is only able to offer favor boxes in packages of 24. We had exactly 50 guests, so this left us in the difficult position of either having 22 more or 2 less favor boxes than we needed. We ended up buying a different style favor box to make up the difference, rather than purchasing an additional package of 24 favor boxes from Kate - which ultimately ended up working out fine and suited the informal style of our wedding.
My entire experience working with Amaryllis was extremely disappointing, and I would NOT recommend them to any other brides in the DC area. Please e-mail me for a more detailed review of my experience with Amaryllis.
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