Hello, everyone! Twistie here. Before we get started, I’d like to thank NtB for asking me to fill in for her while she’s changing that Never to Now! I’ll do my best to reward her trust and keep her flame going in the coming week.

And on to the topic at hand:

One thing to keep in mind while planning your wedding is that once the ceremony is over, for all the traditions and expectations what you’re throwing is a party. You have guests who expect to be fed and entertained. Somehow, though, guests at many weddings feel more like accessories than, well, guests.

How can you avoid this? Here are a few common complaints about weddings and some ideas on how to make your wedding one your guests will remember fondly.

1: Lack of entertainment.

Yes, everyone expects the Electric Slide and toasts at a wedding, but why stop there? Teach a dance from your ethnic background, hire a juggler; just do something a little unexpected.

2: Hunger and thirst.

It doesn’t matter how much you entertain your guests if they go home hungry or thirsty. I’ll never forget the wedding I attended once where the caterer set out a bowl with about a dozen artichoke hearts for some sixty guests. If you can’t afford enough of something that everyone can have some, leave it off your menu and choose something else.

3: Inadequate facilities.

People need chairs, toilets, shade from the sun and protection from the rain. Be sure to prepare for this. Uncomfortable guests will leave as quickly as they can.

4: Long stretches with no sign of the guests of honor.

Marathon photo sessions leave your guests hanging around with little to do. Try to schedule all or at least some of your photos before the wedding. If you want to keep to the tradition of not seeing one another before the ceremony, do the ones that don’t require you to both be in the picture. Or consider hiring a photographer who specializes in a photojounalistic style. You’ll get less posed pics, but there won’t be as much of a gap in the festivities.

Also, if you’re having a photo session between the ceremony and the reception, try to make sure your guests have something to do while they wait for you. Have appetizers ready for them, or set up an activity to keep them entertained.

5: No contact with the bride and groom.

Is a receiving line really the most fun? No, it isn’t. Still, it’s a great chance to see every single guest and make sure they get a moment with you. If you can’t stand that idea and are having assigned seating, make sure you circulate to every single table at some point in the reception. Whatever you do, don’t spend all your time at the head table or a sweetheart table and forget to talk to the people you invited.

With a little thought for the comfort and pleasure of your guests, you can have a wedding people will talk about for years to come…and in a way you’ll like!

The foibles that turn a bride-to-be into a raging, foaming-at-the-mouth bridezilla are just part of what makes planning a wedding so much fun. Cross my heart. The best things in life are seldom free, and many young ladies and gents find that they pay in spades for the privilege of having a “perfect” wedding. What could go wrong? How about everything under the sun…

The well-wishes that come in the form of cards, phone calls, e-mails and letters after you announce your engagement may or may not sweeten the sting of hearing things like, “It’s about time,” and “So, he’s finally decided to make an honest woman of you!” The loved ones that swore up and down that they would be there for you during your engagement will be replaced by androids programmed to make constant quips about shotguns, living in sin, wedding night terrors, edible underpants, and garter removal. The help you expected to receive during these first weeks and months of planning? Don’t look for it here unless you’re planning to serve up a heaping helping of resentment along with your chicken, fish, and vegetarian plates.

Your wedding dress is lovely. Your wedding dress makes you look like the woman you’ve always wanted to be. Unfortunately, the wedding dress you chose and the wedding dress the salon ordered for you are not the same dress. You will be told by a perky yet grandmotherly woman that they can order the correct dress, provided you don’t mind receiving it the day before your wedding. Or the right dress will come in a size that will either force you to hold your breath for the duration of your wedding or require so many alterations to scale down that your seamstress will decide to enlist the help of an experienced structural engineer. You will then enjoy a lengthy period of nail biting while you wait to find out whether you will actually be able to wear the dress of your dreams.

Think you’re having a small wedding? Think again. Once you and your honey have perfected the perfect 15-person guest list, the voices of dissent will start rolling in. Dear old Aunt Eddie will insist that she won’t come unless her three catty, bratty daughters also receive invitations. Grandma, in an effort to be helpful, will send you a spreadsheet of the names and addresses of every relative who ever emigrated from the old country…with the understanding that you’ll be inviting them all. Mom will secretly invite the whole of her bridge club and will wait to tell you this until the last possible moment, i.e. after Suzy, Cyndi, Martha, Billy-Jean, and Samantha have already bought the perfect frocks for the occasion. Soon you will find yourself locked in a dangerous game in which inviting so-and-so means you can’t avoid giving such-and-such a courtesy invitation. Before you know it, you’re looking at a 100+ large guest list.

And speaking of guests, the fine art of the RSVP has gone right out the window, much to Miss Manners’ dismay. Even in a day and age where invitees are required to do little more than write their names on a postage-paid postcard and drop it in the mail, one third of the family, friends, acquaintances, and bridge club members invited to your wedding will remain mum on the ever-so-important issue of whether or not they plan to attend. You will be left using complex equations that a math major would be proud of to figure out how many white folding chairs you need to place on reserve, just to be safe.

Finally, everything will be peachy — until the last possible second, that is. A week before the wedding, your photographer will call to let you know he’s going to be in the hospital on your wedding day. Oh well, at least he’s got someone else all lined up for you, right? The tent and table outlet will lose your order because the dimwit you first talked to didn’t believe you when you told him that your last name is spelled with two t’s instead of just one. You will find out that your dress may not be pressed in time…and that French taffeta (a.k.a. polyester) doesn’t respond well to ironing. After countless dance lessons, your fiancé will forget how to do “the pretzel.” And, as you endeavor to cope with all of this without losing your cool because, as everyone knows, stress causes wrinkles, every well-intentioned busybody in your life will be trying to convince you that your wedding day will be beautiful.

…because it will be. The truth of the matter is that the top five things that will check your bliss as you plan what will likely amount to the biggest shindig you will ever throw will cease to matter when the organist/band/CD/Uncle Joe’s ukulele/string quartet starts playing the music that will usher you down that aisle.

(for Problogger’s Top 5 – Group Writing Project)

I spent this morning watching my mother shimmy in and out of potential MOB dresses. Now, my wedding colors are pale gold and chocolate…yes, I know it’s a summertime wedding. The first words out of my father’s mouth were, “She’s going with an autumn theme?” This is why I’m steering very clear of anything even remotely orange or yellow or red. Let’s just get past that, shall we?

So to ensure that the photos look good — because I’m a sucker for a good photo — I asked my mom and her girlfriend and The Beard’s mom to wear something brownish, if they didn’t mind. The last bit is in there because I thought everyone would have more fun if they wore whatever made them comfortable. Instead of surprising me, however, everyone under the sun is asking me what I think they ought to wear…and “Whatever you want” is apparently not an option.

Here are some examples of suggestions I made:

I should note that my mom is kind of a ‘young mom,’ and is thus comfortable wearing dresses of this sort. YMMMV*. What sort of dresses are they, you ask? Going clockwise, we have a Twelfth St. By Cynthia Vincent brown semi-sheer wool-blend v-neck dress, a Nicole Miller light brown stretch silk slit back dress, an Acrobat brown linen crochet v-neck dress, and an Alexia Admor brown shimmer lace v-neck dress. All lovely choices for an afternoon garden party wedding where browns are an option.

*Your mom’s mileage may vary.

I don’t usually wax poetic about gadgets. Weddings, as a rule, tend to be low-tech affairs, and I’m not a big tech head. But I am a photographoholic, and I recently received one of those spiffy Philips digital photo frames. It’s just about the coolest thing on my desk, and I think it has a lot of potential as both a wedding gift and a piece of supplementary wedding décor.

Now, I like framed photos as much as the next gushy girly-girl, but getting the orientation right and coping serenely with matting issues has never been my strong suit. That’s probably why I like the darn thing so much — loading photos into a sleek plastic frame via a USB cable is something I feel comfortable doing. I’m also a fan of good design, and this frame fits the bill. It’s sleek and simple, and isn’t cluttered up with buttons and switches. The in-frame interface is even fairly intuitive. Plus, the default options seem to be a creamy sort of white or a metallic silver, making it a perfect compliment to most wedding stuff.

First let me suggest you ignore the image quality of the picture above. I don’t know why it came out all skuzzy like that, but trust me when I say that these digital frames really make pics pop with a print-quality LCD display. While you can store photos in the frame itself (how many you can load depends on the resolution of your pics), the frame features a built-in memory card reader that supports a number of data storage formats. This means you can scroll through as many photos as your memory card will hold – which, in my case, is a lot. Then you can either set up the frame in a landscape or portrait orientation to display one pic ad nauseum, scroll through your photos at will, or check them all out slideshow style.

This is where the options come in. Say you want to roll through your pics using the slideshow feature. You can set the frame to change photos randomly or sequentially every five, ten, or thirty seconds; every one, five, or thirty minutes; one, four, or twelve hours; or once per day. I recommend using a longer transition time…seeing a new photo come into view every five seconds really messed with my mind. And if the thought of the current picture simply being replaced by the next bores you, there are fourteen transition effects to choose from, including resolving pixels and a sweep. Want to see them all? Choose the random transition feature and watch your photos get rolled up and peeled back as new pics come into view.

You can also use the frame to modify your photos using a small palette of effects. Morphing a pic from color to b&w or sepia is as easy as pushing a button…because that’s all you have to do. There are a few funny outline type effects that will enclose your photo’s subject in a word bubble, a heart, and things like that. You can crop and rotate. While the modification features don’t exactly add up to Photoshop, they are plenty fun and functional, and generally good for those people who want to play with their images but don’t feel up to learning the ins and outs of design software.

So what makes this a great gift? Imagining buying one for a new bride and groom…but rather than present it to the couple before their nuptials, you wait until after they’re legally wed so that you can load a memory card filled with the photos you took at their ceremony and reception into the frame. They not only receive a pretty cool piece of gear, they can also get a slick preview of their wedding photos before their professional prints come in. And this is a particularly thoughtful gift for those whose photogs have flaked out — it doesn’t happen often, but it happens.

Or consider picking one up before or after the wedding for the husband-and-wife-to-be or a family member. There probably isn’t a loving parent or grandparent in the world that wouldn’t like a digital frame pre-loaded with a memory card worth of photos from their child’s or grandchild’s wedding. And I know my mother is planning a post-wedding brunch with a slide show — a few of these frames set up on tables around the venue would make a great alternative to a projection screen or TV.

Ack! Jury selection strikes and I have still not gotten my bookmarks back, which means that I have to try to cobble a post together on a Sunday night. Cross your fingers and pray that I am not selected for some sort of awful grand jury type case. I don’t mind doing my civic duty, but being a freelance means that if I don’t work, I don’t get paid!

A few of you sent me links to the first legal Hello Kitty Dream Wedding in MTR Station in Hong Kong.

MTR passengers can indulge in a special romantic moment at the “MTR Hello Kitty Love Garden”, launched from today to 14 March 2007. The Love Garden is a prelude to the first-ever legalised MTR Hello Kitty Dream Wedding in Hong Kong. Specially designed by Sanrio, Hello Kitty and Dear Daniel will appear in the “MTR Hello Kitty Love Garden” in wedding dress to celebrate the joy of love with MTR passengers.

Nadine wrote to ask me to recap the ins and outs of guestwear. Specifically, she wanted to know what would be most appropriate for an April wedding with a ceremony starting at 2 p.m. and a reception starting at 5 p.m. I suggested a simple cocktail length frock with a fabulous scarf or chunky jewelry…something like this, perhaps:

And finally, the wonderful Kelly used Photoshop to make a mock-up of my ring based on my description and did a fabulous job! Take a look:

The mysterious Srah of srah blah blah sent me a link some time ago to SimpleSeating. If you’re like me and the notion of writing out a seating chart makes you break out in hives, you may like it. The site lets users create seating charts online using a drag and drop application. There is no software to install and the seating chart SimpleSeating provides includes RSVP and dietary restriction info for each guest.

It looks like this…except bigger:

The app walkthrough on the site is not yet functional, unfortunately. So I signed up to see what it was all about. Making a seating chart for up to 50 guests is free…and if your wedding is larger than that and you want to buck the cost, I imagine you could divide your space into two, three, or four rectangles and then create seating charts for each. Of course, that would be stealing and we all know stealing is wrong. Right?

When I tried to drop my faux wedding guest list to 48, it wouldn’t let me. The first step had me creating new guest profiles. I kind of liked that vegetarian was the default option…though others might not fancy that so much. Nine was the top number of “party members” I could include in each entry. Then it was on to dragging and dropping tables and chairs into a sort of grid thing. Finally, I shoved my virtual guests’ virtual behinds into said chairs.

Easy? Yes. I love how I can just move the little people all around as much as I want to.