Weddingbee

Before I go any further into my wedding recap, I have to stop to acknowledge the people who made our wedding spectacular. To borrow Mrs. Hummingbird’s term the wedding would not have been possible without the help of our volunteer team of Friendors. We didn’t have a wedding party, but we did have a lot of people who were willing to pitch in and in doing so, they saved us our sanity and a lot of dough. Friendors= priceless!

Photographers

The friendor jackpot all started with Aki. You may recall we asked him to take our photographs because we’ve always been big fans of his work. He takes photographs because he loves it, but in order to preserve the joy of photography, he keeps it as a hobby. He agreed to take our wedding photos, but refused payment. We were completely shocked and totally grateful at his generosity. As if that wasn’t unbelievable enough, Aki then told us that he had a friend, Carlton, who is a great photographer that is just getting into the wedding biz, who’d like to volunteer too. What?! Two volunteer photographers?! (I should mention that I wasn’t a Weddingbee blogger when all of this generosity came rushing in my direction so it was totally genuine!)

Photo of Carlton in action by Aki

All of our guests can thank Aki and Carlton, because we would not have been able to afford our killer reception if we’d paid them what they were worth. They spent 10 hours with us!

Photo of Aki in action by Carlton

Videographer

Our volunteer videographer is actually a documentary filmmaker. Videography was definitely not in our budget and so it goes without saying that we could never afford to pay our friend Michelle what she’s worth. We asked her to just film the ceremony because we wanted her to be able to enjoy the reception and not feel like she was working. I should also mention that she just flew in from London the day before and was all kinds of jet lagged, but man, she was a trooper. Not only did she shoot the ceremony, but she also showed up to shoot while I was getting ready and came to the hotel where Mrs. GB 2.0 was getting ready so that she could be there for the “first look” moment.

Michelle, caught in the background by Carlton

Day of Coordinators

We didn’t have one on the payroll. Aki’s awesome wife, Reiko, volunteered for this position! She helped coordinate at the ceremony site and even took off from work early so that she could make it to our rehearsal. It was a relief to know that she was keeping track of the details and everything went smoothly (except the part that was in my hands… but I’ll tell you about that later).

Photo by Aki

Auntie Gingerbread and Sister Gingerbread helped out with reception coordination. Auntie Gingerbread also made flower kid baskets and flower pens for the guest book!

Auntie Gingerbread is the lovely lady standing next to me.

Sister Gingerbread is in the pretty purple dress. Photo by Carlton.

DJ

Brother Gingerbread is a DJ. He didn’t want to lug all of his equipment on an international flight, but he did create mixed playlists for the reception!

Flowers

Originally, Mama Gingerbread volunteered to do all of the flowers, but she decided that she didn’t want to be so wrapped up in flowers that she would miss all of the mother of the bride moments. She came up with a compromise to work with a florist who would take care of the flower arrangements and order extra flowers so that she could make our bouquets. So in reality Mama Gingerbread paid for all the flowers, but saved money by doing the bouquets herself.

So thank you, dear friendors! If we’d paid you what you were worth, our wedding costs would have gone up by more than 50%! We would have been BBQing in the backyard for our reception, like we did for the rehearsal dinner. Instead, we got to have everything we wanted. We are so lucky!

Is anyone else going the friendor route?

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