Weddingbee

Long time no blog Weddingbee! How have you all been? It’s been so long that I am not sure if any of you new-bees will even know who I am, the site has grown so much since I started blogging not even a year ago now! I have been extremely busy but we are finally feeling settled in our new house in our new city, and the new job is becoming less and less scary as the time goes on. Now, if only I could get rid of that pesky bar course….

Anyhow, I thought it was about time that I post some professional pictures of our wedding day and some vendor reviews. I will start with the small details and reviews of our ceremony and reception cites.

Our juice station on the island:

Our invitation and my rings:

Our funky quartet:

The barn board signs in action:

One of our paper lanterns:

The head table in the middle of the tent:

One of the activity suitcases we made up for the 2 flowergirls:

The wish tree and card box:

Some pictures of the candy buffet:

The Pashmina basket:

Escort Cards:

One of the thank you gifts for our reception hostesses:

The ceremony was held on Willow Island which is part of Wascana Park in Regina. The people at the Wascana Park Authority were wonderful to me and so very accommodating. The ferry drivers even worked around 5 hours of overtime at no extra cost to me. They made sure that all of my other vendors had access to the island all day and helped to set up the ceremony area. The fee was $900 for the whole island for the whole day and that provided ferry rides to all of our guests and vendors throughout the day. My only complaint was that the grass was not as lush as I was hoping, but I would give the Wascana Authority an A!

The Quartet was a last minute addition by my father and although I was generally pleased with the comments that I received on them, they did not play the songs that I had asked them to play throughout the ceremony. They actually only got one of the key songs correct and that was Canon in D when we walked down the aisle. It was all fine and I wasn’t that upset at the change, but I was frustrated that they either a) lied to me about what they could play or; b) ignored my wishes. C+

The Reception was held at the Willow on Wascana restaurant, which is also within Wascana Park but is a privately owned restaurant. I loved the site because it was so close to the ceremony site and allowed for an easy and quick transition from ceremony to cocktail hour. I also loved that it was right on the water and it was a unique and a blank canvas for me to decorate however I wanted. Great food was a priority for Mr. Pumpkin and I, so having the reception at a restaurant with extremely good food seemed like a perfect fit for us.

Unfortunately I was not very happy with the service I received from them. As you might remember from my post on the tasting, we were deciding whether to keep the amuse bouche or not and when I tried to talk to them about that, they were very cryptic and unhelpful. It seemed that no matter what choices I made the dinner was going to cost $30/person. On one hand I am sad that we didn’t keep the amuse bouche because the food quality of everything they served was good but on the other hand I am happy we cut it for time reasons that I will discuss in a moment.

They also would not answer questions about portion sizes which I found extremely frustrating. I really had no idea what the dinner was going to be like going into the night, and that drove me crazy because as I mentioned before, the food was a very high priority for us. They even changed something in the dinner without asking us - we were supposed to have oven roast baby potatoes and we ended up with garlic mashed and we had different vegetables. I know, not a big deal, I just don’t think that they should make those changes without asking. The late night dinner was mini cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries and although the food was good, it was not worth the $11/person that they charged us. The fries were also cold when they brought them out.

The time concerns alluded to earlier was the biggest problem that we had with the Willows. They had told us that it would take 15 minutes from when they started clearing one course to when the next course was fully served so we had planned our speeches around that time schedule. Another priority for us was to keep everything flowing and to keep the sections where we were forcing our guests to sit for something as short as possible. What we had planned out as an hour and a half long dinner and speeches turned into just under 3 hours because the service was so slow. We also asked for a couple of things throughout the night, such as to have the tent walls rolled up to get some air flowing through, and we were either ignored or forgotten.

My final complaint about the Willows was that we had asked for the bar to be limited to certain drinks but when we got the final bill we found out that they had served some of our guests high end scotch and $50 bottles of wine. We were happy to pay for our guests’ drinks and we are glad that they all seemed to have a great time, but we had asked that they bar be limited to keep the costs down. To have them ignore that was extremely frustrating. What if we couldn’t pay that bill? They shouldn’t have increased our costs without asking us first.

So, my rating of the Willows on Wascana would be an A- for food quality but a D- for service. I was extremely disappointed in the way that we were treated and would not recommend them to anyone.

Finally, we rented chairs, linens and the tent from A-1 Rentals in Regina. I loved our tent and it was brand new so it was extremely white and clean. Everything else that we rented from them was wonderful as well and I thought the prices were extremely reasonable. They even strung up the lights in the tent for us. My only complaint was that they were a little late in delivering the rentals and that caused a little bit of stress on the schedule I had that morning. B+

Next up: The Girls Attire

*Blink 182

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