Joel & Alyssa // Stomer Stearns Japanese Gardens wedding

FROM THE BRIDE // He’s Australian. I’m Filipino. We met in the US. The venue we fell in love with was Japanese. Hoe do we tie that all in? We decided to go with a travel/international theme. I sent out Save the Dates that looked liked postcards, invitations that looked liked passports and rsvp cards that looked liked airplane tickets. We hired a wedding planner to help us out since we moved to Seattle and already booked our venue in LA, and she found this awesome florist who knew how to make every bouquet the way I wanted them to look and improved them with her own suggestions, and still made it under the budget.

My personal favorite of the day was when we gave our vows. Joel showed off his nerdy and goofy personality with his vows and I succeeded with my promise to make him cry. I’m sure Katie, our photographer, did an excellent job of capturing his face. Ever since we found her through Sun and Sparrow and did an engagement shoot with her, we were finally feeling at ease that our photos would turn out beautifully. We weren’t feeling so confident before since we tried out several photographers who just weren’t the style we were looking for…and photos are forever.

My advice to Bride-to-be’s is: don’t do it! ….just kidding! Seriously though, if you don’t have a wedding planner,  at least have a day-of coordinator. It really helps take the stress off your shoulders to have someone take care of any last-minute stuff you didn’t think off. Which for me is transferring the cake I made for our wedding. I was freaking out that it wouldn’t make it in one piece but she just calm told me the caterers will take care of it, and they did! Also, just relax,  it may not go exactly as you planned but at the end of the day, you’ll realize it’s all worth it and that you can’t keep the stupid smile off your face every time you call him “my husband”.