Roses, peonies, ranunculus, freesia. There are so many flowers to consider for your wedding that something so exciting can be so overwhelming. Add to this the fact that two guys, with no floral experience, are the grooms will take the definition of overwhelmed to a new level. Here’s how Alan and Adrian found their perfect wedding flowers.
Wedding Floral: Our Process
Q: You are two guys planning a wedding. Honestly, how important were flowers to you?
A: Adrian and I wanted flowers but we wanted a masculine fee so we took a conservative approach to floral design.
Choosing a Vendor
Q: You’ve said in previous meetings that most of your vendors were included in your Aldea package. Did your florist provide the options you needed? Were you able to adjust your package based on your desire for a more masculine approach?
A: Aldea had only 1 floral vendor to choose from when we first started looking at florists. That florist didn’t want to customize the floral package (we obviously don’t need a bridal bouquet or toss bouquet) and we felt the communication was delayed. We struggled with how to move forward until Andy Castano joined the Aldea vendor list. What a blessing.
Q: How was Andy different than the vendor you had previously considered?
A: His style is primarily boho-chic but he was very open to our ideas. Andy also had no concerns about tweaking the venue’s pre-set package to better fit our needs. He added boutonnieres and the other touches that we needed without flinching. Even better, he stayed within our budget by suggesting alternative options!
Choosing Your Flowers
Q: Alan, we love that you and Adrian like to think outside the box when it comes to your wedding. Did this remain true for floral? Will you share with us what florals you chose?
A: Seeing that we are far from traditional we wanted to stay away from using a lot of roses. We just didn’t want that stereotypical wedding. Andy’s suggestions were amazing; he suggested that we use two different flowers – one to represent me and one to represent Adrian. The men in my bridal party (including myself) will be wearing cymbidium orchids and Adrian’s side will be wearing peach freesias. We asked Andy why he suggested those choices and his response was that the flowers were like our personalities – cymbidiums are loud and dramatic while freesias are more refined and sophisticated!
The Groomsmaid Bouquets
Q: What about the girls? What will they be carrying?
A: My groomsmaids will carry bouquets featuring cymbidium orchids, stock, Asiatic lilies, blush gerbera daisies and alstromeria. Adrian’s girls will have peach freesias, stock, Asiatic lilies, blush gerbera daisies, and alstroemeria. As a special treat, Andy wanted to get a photo of all our girls’ dresses because he wants to tailor each bouquet according to the style of each of their dresses Personal touches like this really made us feel that Andy wanted to make our wedding special.
The Reception
Q: Knowing that you wanted a more masculine approach to your wedding, did you choose floral for your centerpieces?
A: We’ve chosen a minimalistic look for the cocktail hour and reception. We added a few small peach flower arrangements to the lobby to help maintain the color scheme. Our centerpieces are black candelabras with rose petals sprinkled around the base. And, we’ve decided to repurpose the groomsmaid bouquets to dress up the head table.
Flexibility is Key
Q: You have gotten engaged, found a venue, selected save-the-dates, invitations and attire for both of you and your parties, and chosen a photographer, videographer, caterer, baker, hair and makeup artist, florist and planned a honeymoon. What was the most challenging step in the planning process?
A: By far, picking flowers! Adrian and I aren’t familiar with flower types and I’m colorblind so I had to learn what the shades of peach looked like. Andy was able to simply things for us to easily understand. I’m glad we remained open minded because the end result is far different than we initially imagined but will be incredible!
Ready, Set, Eat, Drink, Party! This week Alan J. Tomasetti and Adrian Juarez sit down with us to dish about their reception so put your dancing shoes on because we are talking catering, cake and tunes.
Eat, Drink Party: Planning the Reception
Q: Let’s talk food. You are Italian and Adrian is Mexican. Was it easy to select a menu for your reception?
A: Food is the centerfold of any Italian or Mexican household and we knew that we wanted high quality food, and lots of it. Aldea has several catering options in their packages and the caterers come to the venue as part of Aldea’s open house at the end of each month. This allowed us the opportunity to taste a variety of options.
We chose a buffet over sit-down because we wanted to provide more options to guests. We narrowed our choices between Babbo Italian Eatery, and Mi Catering. Mi Catering had a lovely variety of different cruise options and the flavor was amazing. We didn’t like the fact that they have a staff member serving food from behind the buffet. We felt that would slow down the line.
Choosing the Menu
Q: What made Babbo a slam dunk option?
A: Guests are given the choice of one appetizer, two salads, two pastas, two main courses and focaccia bread. We were pleasantly surprised by the options and quickly scheduled a private tasting.
My mom flew in for a visit so Adrian and I each brought our moms to the tasting. We sampled six appetizers, five salads, seven pastas, and eight main courses and, as you can imagine, took food home! In the end, we chose mini meatballs in marinara and the pesto bruschetta for appetizers which are served during the cocktail hour, the roasted brussel sprout beet salad, Napa Valley salad, pasta primavera, three cheese mac and cheese, Tuscan chicken and asparagus fra diavolo.
The Bar
Q: That is a lot of food! How about the bar?
A: We opted for the beer and wine open bar option, mostly because it was more cost effective. Aldea offers several options and we chose chardonnay, pinot grigio, merlot and two domestic beers (Bud and Coors Light). We also added two specialty cocktails– the Mai Tai and peach margarita – both drinks we have enjoyed during our travels. Adding a specialty ‘welcome’ drink, to kick off the cocktail hour, allows us to thank our guests for coming in a unique way.
Something Sweet
Q: We love wedding cake! So, let’s talk dessert… Tell us about your cake.
A: Let’s face it…we are two guys getting married and we want our cake to be more masculine than traditional but we also wanted something impressive. As a result, we opted for the four-tier option. We designed two tiers in a navy quilt pattern accented with silver beads and the alternating two are solid with a dark grey ribbon at the base. Peach orchids will accent in four strategic spots.
Q: What does your cake topper look like?
A: We decided to have our cake topper in script, but we wanted to have our first names instead of our last names. We custom ordered our cake topper from Chicago Factory on Etsy. Since the top of our cake is 6”, we wanted topper to be flush with the size and chose the silver paint on birch. We also got the option to have the removable pegs so we can display it on our mantle in the stand the company provided us.
Kicking it into High Gear: Choosing your Entertainment
Q: Let’s get our groove on! Did you decide on a DJ or live music for your reception?
A: Adrian and I came to the conclusion that we needed someone that could bring people on the dance floor, keep everyone engaged, and make the evening a huge hit. Aldea has 2 DJ options, Push Play Entertainment, and Tony the Entertainer.
Push Play Entertainment has a lot of bells and whistles to make a reception look like a borderline nightclub but we didn’t feel like the DJ had the personality we were looking for. After speaking with Tony for a few minutes, his outgoing personality really got us excited. He’s very flexibly with modifying the reception schedule since we’re not doing a garter/bouquet toss and tweaking various other games to suit us more. He’s been extremely responsive and amazing to work with.
In this issue of Alan & Adrian Get Married, we find out about their creative design for the Save the Date and Wedding Invitation. Are you struggling with the overwhelming amount of choices? Here is how Alan and Adrian navigated the numerous options and found the perfect design!
Save the Date
Q: You mentioned earlier that you selected a wedding date over a holiday weekend so that your out of town guests would have more time to travel. Did you send Save-the-Dates to give them advance opportunities to make their travel arrangements?
A: We did. We felt that our out of town guests would appreciate receiving a Save-the-Date well in advance of the invitation.
Q: Did you go with a local designer/printer or did you use an online resource?
A: We found so many websites and ultimately picked a travel theme card from Minted to match the theme of our wedding. Minted was having a promotion during the time we purchased so we were able to come in a bit under budget as well.
Q: Did you add any special touches to your Save-the-Date?
A: We were sure to include our wedding website on The Knot so that the relevant information needed for travel arrangements was contained in one place. We also ordered a custom wax seal from Nostalgic Impressions. Adding that special touch to our envelopes made our announcement much more special.
Inviting Your Guests
Q: Tell us about your invitation.
A: We found the perfect invitation on Emdotzee. Sticking with our travel theme, we designed an airline ticket syle invite. The design included a folder that held directions to the venue, an abbreviated schedule, and information on guest attire, directions from the airport and RSVP info. The folder also included the ticket (invite) which included our details – date, time, location, and weeding website. We placed these in silver envelopes and sealed them with our wax seal.
Regardless of whether you purchase your invitations from an online stationery store or have a custom design created from a local designer, make sure that your invites reflect the feel of your wedding and the love you have for each other.
Babydoll Weddings is excited to introduce Alan and Adrian. We are delighted to provide hair and makeup services for their entire wedding party this coming January, 2018. We fell in love with them instantly and were beyond thrilled when they agreed to let us share their love story with you. Alan will be taking over our blog for a special series “Alan & Adrian Get Married” sharing their wedding planning experiences as a newly engaged couple planning a same-sex wedding. We hope you love them as much as we do!
Weddings can be an overwhelming experience with a lot of details being thrown at you from left and right. So what do you do? Some couples decide to hire a wedding planner to help wrangle all the numerous details and vendors for the day of, while others decide to plan their wedding themselves.
Wedding Planner Pros
If you decide to go with a wedding venue that isn’t all-inclusive then I highly recommend hiring a wedding planner. The wedding planner becomes the main point of contact for all your vendors. She/he will manage every detail for you which frees you up to simply enjoy being engaged. We learned early on that planning a wedding and coordinating with the many vendors is time consuming. For these reasons and more, hiring a wedding coordinator is worth the money.
All-Inclusive Venues
Because Adrian and I chose an all-inclusive wedding venue, we decided to forego a wedding planner. We chose a travel themed wedding and we’re so thankful that our venue has a lot of decorations already on hand (and very tasteful too) so we don’t need to worry about setting up or taking down any of the decorations, which gives us one less detail to worry about. We do still need to work with the vendors in terms of selecting the meal options, cake details, and other customized requests, but the venue will handle the same details a wedding planner would (arrival times, liaising with vendors, etc).
One of the things we love about Aldea is that they will schedule various meetings to keep us on track including a decor meeting to review decor options for the ceremony, cocktail hour, the reception, and a final meeting before the wedding to go over what you need to bring the day before so they can set it up ahead of time. What’s also nice about Aldea is that you can go into your decoration meetings knowing exactly what decorations you want where, or you can completely leave it up to their discretion. They let the couple be in control which certainly alleviates a lot of stress.
Planning Websites
There are many websites out there that are helping plan the other details of our wedding, but the two main ones that I’ve focused on are theknot.com and pinterest.com. While we all know Pinterest can store visual details, but I took it one step further. I use Pinterest to pin all my ideas that I need to narrow down, and then I unpin the ideas that I don’t want there anymore and keep that one idea that I’m going to go with. For example, if I’m trying to decide on dresses for my girls, I’ll pick all the different styles I like and then I’ll start to remove all the dresses I’m not a fan of until I finally find a style that I like and then I leave it there in it’s own Pinterest board so it’s sectioned off and kept away from my other ideas.
The Knot has been the other great asset when planning. Not only does it create your wedding website, but it keeps track of the budget, the guest list and the RSVPs, and also has it’s own set of design ideas. Need a countdown calendar and checklist to help you keep track of your to-do list? It’s here! I can honestly say we’d be all over the place and very confused if it wasn’t for this website.
The Decision is Yours
No matter if you decide to leave everything in the hands of a wedding planner, or decide to take the bull by the horns and plan it all yourself, do what you think will cause you the least amount of stress because it’s your special day and the only thing you need to worry about is proclaiming your love to your spouse to be.
Babydoll Weddings is excited to introduce Alan and Adrian. We are delighted to provide hair and makeup services for their entire wedding party this coming January, 2018. We fell in love with them instantly and were beyond thrilled when they agreed to let us share their love story with you. Alan will be taking over our blog for a special series “Alan & Adrian Get Married” sharing their wedding planning experiences as a newly engaged couple planning a same-sex wedding. We hope you love them as much as we do!
Finding that perfect venue is a fun process, however it can be taxing on a couple when they don’t know what they are looking for in a venue. In a previous post, I mentioned that for our wedding we wanted to keep it in Arizona and to have it on January 14, 2018. Arizona has many beautiful venue options, all with different styles. We wanted to find a place with character that left people talking after the wedding, so for us that ruled out the various country clubs, hotels, and other generic locations. We also wanted to be very budget friendly too.
After browsing online at many possible venues and doing extensive research on each of the venues, we narrowed it down to 2 venues that we wanted to see in person: The Windmill Winery in Florence, Arizona and Aldea at Tlaquepaque in Phoenix, Arizona. What drew us to these venues was that they shared a lot of character in their décor, and they are both all-inclusive locations (I’ll discuss all-inclusive vs. hiring vendors separately in a future post).
Windmill Winery
The first place that we went to was The Windmill Winery. After being greeted in the parking lot by their resident goose, we were met by the venue manager and given a tour. They had two different options for the venue, their 100-year-old barn and their Hampton’s-styled Lake House dock. We first got to see the Lake House where the ceremony would be held on the dock over their lake that overlooks the Superstition Mountains, and the reception would be held inside the Lake House. Since our wedding is in January, we decided to go in the winter months to see what the scenery would look like outside at that time. Unfortunately, a lot of the bushes and grasses were brown and didn’t fit the aesthetic that we were going for outdoors.
The inside of the Lake House is very spacious and sets the mood perfectly for an evening reception. We also toured the barn which had a nice rustic feel to it and plenty of room for our guests. Despite this, we felt that the space would feel overwhelming if we didn’t have a wedding that would fill the space appropriately. This venue can also have multiple weddings going on at once with all the different areas they had to offer and that wasn’t very appealing to us. In the end, Adrian and I felt that the long drive from Phoenix to Florence along with the possibility of having multiple weddings at the same location didn’t make The Windmill Winery our choice of venue.
Aldea at Tlaquepaque
We next came across Aldea at Tlaquepaque and I was blown away as soon as I stepped foot into the venue. Aside from being a carbon copy of Tlaquepaque in Sedona, as soon as you left the parking lot you could barely hear the cars on the road. The venue only hosts one wedding per day, which was a huge plus for us. The grand tour showed the lovely courtyard where the ceremony would take place that also has a tree covered with lights all over it and a bubbling fountain. The reception is held indoors in a large enough space for eating and dancing, but not too large that you feel overpowered by the size of the room.
Adrian and I loved the Spanish décor and architecture. This venue is an all-inclusive venue where one flat amount (that includes tax and tip) includes music, catering, cake, decorations (yes, they provide their own decorations), photographer, and day of coordinator. After leaving that venue I couldn’t stop thinking about how beautiful the venue was.
Only a week later is when we made the big decision to lock the date in and we were fortunate that we got the day that we wanted. We are very excited to move on to the tasting process!
Stay tuned for more about Alan and Adrian’s love story!
Babydoll Weddings is excited to introduce Alan and Adrian. We are delighted to provide hair and makeup services for their entire wedding party this coming January, 2018. We fell in love with them instantly and were beyond thrilled when they agreed to let us share their love story with you. Alan will be taking over our blog for a special series “Alan & Adrian Get Married” sharing their wedding planning experiences as a newly engaged couple planning a same-sex wedding. We hope you love them as much as we do!
Meet Alan & Adrian: The Proposal
Alan J. Tomasetti
A couple’s wedding is one of the many milestones in their life that not only symbolizes unity, but it’s a celebration of their love and sharing it with everyone special in their life. Finding that special someone who will share both the good and the bad times with you, who encourages you to be the best you can be, and who will love you beyond the end of time seems like an impossible task to some people, but as my mom would say “never say never” and with that I’ve always been a hopeless romantic hoping to find my someday prince. We’ve all heard of the phrase “trust your gut instinct”, and I can certainly say that I’m thankful that I trusted mine.
How We Met
I first met Adrian in the summer of 2014 on an online dating app. For someone who isn’t into the whole bar scene or having friends setting me up on a blind date, online dating was my option if I had any chance to find a date. Online dating has come a long way since it first started and it no longer carries with it such negative connotations. After talking on-line for a few weeks, he asked me if I wanted to go get some coffee with him. I’m not a coffee drinker, but I thought why not, Starbucks has tea and I need the points to keep me in the gold card club.
Our First Date
If there’s one way to impress me on a first date, it was to take me somewhere unique that I haven’t been to before that has a lot of character. Our first date was just that because to my surprise, he decided to take me to Gold Bar Espresso in Tempe. The coffee shop had a lot of personality and hometown charm, which certainly caught my attention. They also had a lot of tea flavors to choose from, which was also a plus in my book.
When I got there, I saw Adrian was wearing a black V-neck shirt and jeans and we sat outside and talked for what seemed like hours. I’m the kind of person that clock watches because my life runs on a schedule and I hate to be late to things, yet all that time I was with him I didn’t care where I had to be next. We laughed for hours and stayed there past closing time. After we said goodnight and shared our first kiss, I couldn’t wait to see Adrian again and what our future adventures could hold.
“THE” Trip
Fast forward to May 2016, after many adventures both in Arizona and all over the US, we decided to take our first international cruise to together along with some of our closest friends. We visited Ensenada, Mexico on a 3-day cruise and got to enjoy all the fun activities on the ship as well as the local culture and amazing seafood in Ensenada. On the last evening of the cruise, we were having dinner in the main dining room and were just finishing up our dessert when Adrian went back to the room to grab our jackets (I told him earlier in the day I wanted to take some pictures of the sunset and it was getting chilly out).
We made it to the very top deck of the ship and were huddled close to stay warm. We took some photos facing towards the sunset at first and then he wanted me to turn around for what I thought were going to be selfies. Adrian turned to me and said: “This has been the best trip ever, and I couldn’t imaging spending it or my life with anyone else. I’ve never been this happy with anyone else and I love you so much, and so Alan Tomasetti, Alan James Tomasetti, will you marry me”? Of course I said yes!!
The Ring
According to Adrian, he had gotten the ring earlier than he expected and knew the cruise would be going on a few weeks later and would be the perfect opportunity to propose. During dinner, he was able to hand off the ring to our friends at dinnertime to store in his friend’s purse. After we made it to the top deck and took some photos, they made the switch for the ring. After a few stumbling over words, he proposed and we celebrated the rest of the evening!
Being a type-A personality, I’m still shocked that Adrian was able to pull a fast one on me, but it was the best surprise I could ever ask for. I’ve found my better half, my companion in the journey will call life, my true soulmate. I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with him.
Stay tuned for more about Alan and Adrian’s love story!
