Karen Smallbone

The Wedding Show is on this weekend at the Carlu in Toronto. This is my favourite wedding event of the year, because you’re able to talk one-on-one with wedding experts in a beautiful, intimate setting. I’m not able to exhibit this year, but if you’re planning a wedding and you want to meet some of the most creative vendors in the Toronto area, this is an event you won’t want to miss.

To receive $3 off your tickets, order online and quote TWS09 for your discount.

The Details
Friday, January 9 5pm-9pm
Saturday, January 10 10am-6pm
Sunday, January 11 10am-5pm
The CARLU
444 Yonge Street, Seventh Floor

Melissa and Mike tied the knot on 06.07.08, at the Park Hyatt. From the looks of their photos, they had a beautiful wedding.

We created the black and white with a hint of red, favours for their wedding. Inside the cute Chinese food containers were 2 personalized fortune cookies. One was the traditional vanilla flavour and the other was chocolate. The fortune inside read, “Thank you for sharing our special day. Mike & Melissa 06.07.08″

Thank you to Mike and Melissa for sharing these stunning photos with us. All photos were taken by Catherine Farquharson of Documentographer.

Congratulations Mike and Melissa!

You might remember Julia & Joey from a previous post- “Julie’s Perfect Pink Shower”. Julie was kind enough to send me some of the professional pictures from her wedding. All of these gorgeous photos were taken by Mimmo+Naz.

Julie & Joey had their reception at The Eglington Grand , a beautiful art deco style movie theatre that has been revamped into a gorgeous venue for weddings and other special occasions.

In keeping with the movie theatre theme, Julia and Joey gave fun old fashioned popcorn boxes filled with popcorn as a favour to their guests. The favours also served as placecards. Instead of using numbers, each table was named after one of the couples favourite movies. A label with the guests names, and table was used to close the bag of popcorn. We created the labels to go with the design from the invitation.

I’m sure you will agree that Julie & Joey make a stunning couple!
Congratulations to Julie & Joey! May your lives be filled with much love and happiness! It was a pleasure working with you.

Julie’s wedding shower is what I dream of. Full of pink and brown… and lots of delicious sweets!

She was kind enough to send me some photos.

As you can see, Julie stayed true to her pink and brown theme! This gorgeous cake was made by Irresistible Cakes.

The orchid centerpieces were made by Primavera Flowers.

This sweet table is to die for. As I was typing this I could almost smell it. I think I need to go and find some chocolate!

Julie said her Maid of Honour made the pretzel sticks which are dipped in caramel, then chocolate and then drizzled with more chocolate. A family friend made the pink and brown chocolates shown at the top right hand of the picture.

Yummy!

Here is a photo of Julie and her fiance. The story is so cute. I think he’s a keeper!

Congratulations Julie. Thank you for sharing your photos with us. You have tons of great ideas!

I can’t wait to see what you do for your wedding.

Cynthia was kind enough to share some of the photos from her wedding with me.

I love the fortune cookies with the personalized message. This is a great idea!

I love how the fortune cookie is repeated as a menu holder.

Congratulations Cynthia and Rob. Your wedding looks like it was beautiful! Thanks for sharing your day with us.

Learzi and Richard were kind enough to share some photos of their beautiful pink and green, zen-themed wedding. Working with Learzi, I can tell how important the little things were that made the day that much more spectacular. She has great attention to detail.

Learzi looks lovely!

I love these flower rings for the flowergirls.

Too cute! I love the pink and green bottoms on the dresses.

Beautiful cake.

Learzi and Richard gave their guests these lovely candles. The candles were coffee scented and had coffee beans at the bottom. They came with a wooden base. I designed the labels using the orchid theme with a zen feel and pink and green colours. I bet the guests were pleased to receive such a nice favour.

Congratulations to Richard and Learzi! It was a pleasure to work with you and I really enjoyed designing the labels and postcards for your wedding.

Last weekend we had the pleasure to participate in The Wedding Show. It was held at the gorgeous Carlu.

It was wonderful to meet everyone who stopped by. I hope that you found lots of good ideas to help you with your wedding planning.

Here are some photos of our booth that we built for the show.

I have lots of great stuff to share with you. Beautiful gowns, flowers, gorgeous cakes, invitations.. all the good stuff. I’m hoping to get those posted this week. Check back soon.

We are pleased to announce that we will be participating in the Wedding Show in January. If you are getting married soon, be sure to plan on visiting. We will be showcasing our gorgeous new lollipops, custom chocolate bar wrappers, some beautiful new ribbons, and boxes. Be sure to stop by and say hi to us. We are located in the round room.

We have 2 tickets to The Wedding Show that we would love to give away to a lucky person. If you would like to be entered into our draw, please email me your name and wedding date before January 1. We will draw from all of the names we receive on January 2, 2008. The winner will be contacted by email.

For more details about the show, the wedding professionals who are exhibiting and the special highlights, visit The Wedding Co.’s site. The show runs January 11-13 at the Carlu in Toronto.

On August 23, Richard and I will celebrate our 10th anniversary. Wow, time really flies. I remember the day we got married like it was yesterday. I thought it would be fun to share our wedding day with you.

Richard and I designed our own invitaitons and my best friend Cindy printed them for us. Our colour theme was sage green, yellow and brick red. We used daisies throughout the wedding. We made our invitation in a square shape (which was unheard of at the time) and made square envelopes that folded over and were sealed with a daisy sticker.

We had our ceremony and reception at Rich’s parent’s. They lived out in the country and had lots of land for us to use. We built what we called the “structure” which we were going to use to get married in if it rained. We had our reception in a big tent.

Building the “structure”

Finished “structure”

I wanted to have an arch built out of twigs. Rich and his bestman Rob built this the day before the wedding.

Here are some of the photos from our wedding. We hired Marc Rochette from Reportage. He did a wonderful job. We really wanted the photo journalist style and didn’t want any posed photos. After a while we didn’t even realize they were there taking our pictures. We are big fans of black and white pictures so most of our photos were taken in b&w with a grainy texture.

Here is our cake. I was all about the cake. It was made by Cakewalkers in London. They did an awesome job. I really loved it.

Our favours. White boxes tied with yellow ribbon and a daisy on top. Inside was a miniture version of our wedding cake made with fruit cake (yuck. I’m not a fan of fruitcake, but Rich loves it.) The photos of the mini cakes aren’t great, we took it and this was the only one. Apparently they tasted good. We also had a small white box with 2 truffles inside tied with yellow ribbon and a daisy on the top. And we also gave a small package of daisy seeds.

Emma took this cool picture. Our wedding was right before she left for college to study photography. Too bad we didn’t get married later, we would have loved for Emma to take all of the pictures.

On May 13th it was my moms 60th birthday. My sister and I planned a surprise party to celebrate. Our colour theme was green and blue and we also used daisies.

I saw these large pompoms in Martha Stewart Weddings and decided to try to make them. They actually turned out pretty well and were easy to make, unlike some of the projects that are shown there.

Here are the 2 cakes that I made.

We gave out favours in the aqua and apple take out boxes. Inside was very yummy chocolate covered peanut brittle made by Jenny who is a friend from Stratford who has a business making peanut brittle.

Aidan was kind enough to provide the musical entertainment.

Me, my mom and my sister.

Thank you to everyone who helped us make Mom’s birthday a special surprise.

Hope you had a great birthday Mom. I can only hope that I look as good as you do when I turn 60!