We had a violin/cello duo for the ceremony. Great price and they sounded great. She worked with me on the fact that it was outside with no cover, when most musicians would not do it because they were afraid their instruments were going to get wet. The one thing about them is that after I sent the check in, they didn't send the signed contract back to me in a timely manner. I emailed her two times over the course of several weeks with no response, until finally I sent a third (terse) email asking what the status of our contract was, and then she responded saying that she thought she had sent it. But everything was fine at the ceremony, and they sounded great.
Jerry was a really nice guy to work with. He allowed us to edit the ceremony as we saw fit and had various options of readings and things that we could choose from. He also gives you a print-out of the ceremony wording in a nice little booklet and a special (more decorative) certificate of marriage in addtion to the official one.
So, I'm probably the only person in the world who has a pooper scooper on her list of wedding vendors. But our ceremony site is at the end of a trail that allows dogs and horses, and Kevin wasn't looking forward to asking one of his buddies to clean up horse poop on our wedding day. I didn't see Jory as he was gone by the time I got there, but I didn't step in any horse poo, so I'm assuming he did his job!
What can I say? Izzy is my idol, LOL. She's absolutely fantastic, the most graceful person, and extremely charismatic. She not only managed to dance in front of a bunch of stone-faced people who were staring at her wondering what the heck they'd gotten themselves into, but by the end, she had them all dancing around the room in a conga line, and circled around the dance floor for a belly dance lesson. I've even had two people vow they are going to start taking belly dance lessons, LOL!
We got the natural colored wood chairs, and they were pretty beat up, but they served their purpose.
Nikki is a real nice lady and really worked with me on my pickiness about my appearance. I hardly ever wear makeup and when I do, you can't really tell I have it on, so when she did the trial, it was way to heavy for me. I also wanted some changes to the hair. On the wedding day, she worked with me to get it exactly the way I wanted it, including brushing my eyelashes out for about 10 minutes because I was obsessing over the fact that the mascara had made them stick together, LOL. The end product was lovely.
The chocolate cake with Bavarian cream filling is To. Die. For. They did a good job with the Flyers logo, though they misunderstood me when I said I wanted the black done in fondant. They did the whole design in fondant, but it looked nice and tasted out of this world. They will give you free samples of any number of cakes and fillings, too.
I love the set of photos we got with Elya... at first I felt like she didn't give us enough direction (how to stand, where to hold our arms, what to do, etc.), but after having a session with a real wedding photographer that did give us direction, I have to say that we look more comfortable in hers because we were doing whatever came naturally. Though I would have liked more cueing on when to smile and when not to smile, because in some of the pictures, one of us is smiling and the other isn't.
The DJ was very professional and did a great job, except for the fact that he played the first dance song at the same volume as the background music, so no could hear the words because everyone was talking. The words were the most important part because the song was Crazy Woman and it was kind of funny, but alas, no one heard it. Also, I spent a lot of time filling out their forms on the website with schedules, song lists and the bio of the belly dancer that he was supposed to read, but he somehow didn't get all of the information and had to ask me for a lot of it. Then we had to go to the back room and get on the internet to look up the bio of the belly dancer again.
These poor people had such a hard time with my shoes. They had to dye my shoes over and over again to get them dark enough to match my ivory dress. Since I didn't have a swatch to give them, they were afraid to make them too dark. I finally left the dress there and they were able to get a good match.