Vendors Review: Gubahan Cinta, Joo Bee & Fiesta De Arena

Today marks our 2nd month anniversary. Seems forever ago we got married. Married life is different because spoiled brats like me need to start helping with the chores more regularly =P And when you marry, you inherit a man to clean up after and look after when he falls sick. FYI, a sick husband is like a sick, hairy, XXL child. You’ve been warned ladies.

Plus, every week I’m splitting my free time between the husband and my parents. Daughters, if you will be moving out on your wedding night like I did, be prepared for your mother to miss you a LOT. Hence, I’m sleeping over now at my parents’ house. Thank God for the long weekend!

Anyway. In this post I shall knock out 3 more vendor reviews for gubahan, bunga pahar and live station.

Gubahan Cinta – Gubahan, Sireh Dara, Sireh Junjung

I booked Gubahan Cinta 1 year in advance hence I got her 2014 rate of $26/tray. Her sireh dara and sireh junjung are priced at about $140-$150 each. Her works are gorgeous.

If you intend to book this vendor, take note that you should retain every item including every ribbon/flower/pin etc. to be returned the next day to get back your refundable deposit ($80). So make sure to dismantle everything carefully right after your event 🙂

With regards to sireh junjung and sireh dara, I feel that these traditional elements are of no use now since no one chews betel leaves anymore. I only got them at my mother’s insistence and pressure from relatives. I feel that a lot of brides these days get it simply to avoid the gossip. Which is why they are so expensive. Not to mention the bunga pahar. Can you believe that you need to spend over $400 on 4 vases of flowers and betel leaves in the name of tradition?

Thank God they are gorgeous though, and I feel that they really do add the seri of the pelamin (: But I will save photos of the pelamin for my review of the decor vendor hehe because it deserves a whole other post on its own =P

I think there’s quite a bit of confusion over the sireh2. What I know is that the sireh junjung must be taller than the sireh dara because the former symbolises the husband’s role as the head of the household. In terms of which party gives which party what, I heeded the advice of Wannie from Gubahan Cinta; I gave my husband the Sireh Junjung while he gave me the Sireh Dara.

Aniwae, 3 weeks prior to my event, I was asked to send over my hantaran items to Wannie’s house in Toa Payoh and made full payment. I honestly did not know that this would be a consultation session as well but thank God I had come prepared with mock-ups of the the tray designs I wanted for both bride and groom. I literally cut and pasted different flowers/trays that she had as well as prepared a mock-up of the tray tag. Hehe. Unfortunately, some of the trays I wanted were no longer being offered. So don’t have your heart too set on something until you’ve checked with your vendor.

Wannie took careful notes of everything I said, asked me to send her photos of all of my mock-ups, and produced brilliant results which you can see for yourself in the photos above (:

Tip #1: Prepare mock-ups or screenshots of the design you want for both the bride’s gifts, groom’s gifts, plus tray tags. For the sireh dara and sireh junjung, the flowers really depend on availability so what we did was I told her the general theme (bold, subtle etc.), the colours I wanted, and the colours I did not like.

FYI, talking about gubahan, I heard a not so great review about a vendor, RT, that my good friend took for gubahan + bridal room decor for her wedding in September. Which leads me to my next tip.

Tip #2: BTBs, make sure to discuss with your bridal room vendor to find out if there will be any drilling etc. because the holes will require painting over after the vendor has patched them up with putty. And lay down the rules clearly with regards to what time, at the latest, you expect the services to be completed so they don’t show up at 11pm & you can make sure that you have a good night’s sleep before your event day, InsyaAllah (:

Joo Bee – Bunga Pahar

Joo Bee is located on the first floor of the Larkin Terminal Central (take SBS 170 after exiting customs at JB Sentral). The person we worked with is Auntie Gan. We ordered 80 sticks of bunga pahar at 4RM each (without salted egg).

I don’t seem to have a good shot of the bunga pahar as a whole but really they were gorgeous 🙂 Aniwae, we were told that they would be ready in about 9 weeks but we dropped by 7 weeks later since we needed to collect our invitation cards across the street at Plaza Larkin anyway. Turns out, the bunga pahar was ready and packed lightly into 2 boxes so that they will not be crushed. They looked exactly like the mock-up she prepared for us on the spot when we first made the order (: You can read more about my trip there in this post

The mock-up.

If you are looking to save a little on DIY supplies for gubahan etc., their store is worth a visit. They have such a selection as you can see below

Fiesta De Arena – Live Station
(Popcorn/Candy Floss/Choc Fountain)

Sample shot of their setup. I will update with shots of the setup at my wedding if I find any.

I got to know about Fiesta De Arena at a cousin’s wedding. Their food is delicious to me. Really good. I love their popcorn, and their chocolate fountain. Never tried their candy floss though but you can’t go wrong with spun sugar. Had no issues with them on event day service =)

However, prior to that, I was liaising with H from FDA who really wasn’t very good at customer service in my opinion. It took about 2 weeks for the invoice to reach me & her responses were slow as well and 1 email was simply “Dah receive invoice??” with no greeting or signature. Then, towards the big day, after not getting a response from them for a week, I checked out their facebook page. Turns out they had parted ways with H and apparently they did not have access to their business email anymore.

Anyway, I got in touch with Joe from FDA and informed him of the change in venue. I also negotiated for the remaining payment to be made on the day itself. Originally, their terms stated full payment to be made prior to event day which to me is just unreasonable when you’re talking about $1.5k. But Joe readily agreed to let me pay the bulk of the invoice upon setup (=

~dah habis dah crite saya~

Wedding invitations settled!

It’s been a while BTBs. I hope you are all having a wonderful Day 2 out of 4 of this glorious long weekend!

Just an update, the fiancé and I went down to Johor last Saturday in search of wedding invitations, wedding favours, as well as bunga manggar and bunga pahar. Fortunately for us, the queues were not half as long as they were when we headed down on 13^th June. FYI, wear comfortable shoes and bring water because the JB custom line can take an hour each way.

The first time we headed down to JB Sentral, bought a cab ticket costing about RM20 and headed down to Angsana Mall. If you are looking for gubahan stuff, bridal stores, flowers, clocks, or general décor stuff, this is a good place to check. Unfortunately for us, we needed none of these things.

This time, we headed down to Larkin instead. We took SBS 170 from JB Sentral, right after exiting customs. The bus terminates at Larkin Bus Terminal which also houses a large shopping place named Larkin Terminal Central. It houses about 3 stores selling gubahan items/bungga manggar/bunga pahar. But lunch comes first so we headed to the Pizza Hut next to the building. There’s a KFC there too, the two establishments oddly share the place so you can walk between both freely.

There’s a bridge on the 2^nd floor I think which connects to KFC. It might be better to take this bridge since going by the ground floor means passing through the wet market.

  

Boy was the food cheap. A drink, 1 rice entrée and 1 spaghetti entrée cost us only 40.90RM, all inclusive. That’s less than SGD$15! Amazing. I think ordering drinks at a Pizza Hut in Singapore would cost you SGD$15 already. I suggest getting a side because the entrée meals were not filling. But best not to overstuff, nanti ngantuk pulak.

The food was decent, much better with a lot of Life chilli.

We then headed back towards the bus terminal for the Joo Bee store on the first floor. The store is towards the end, past the massage chairs.There, we spoke to the petite auntie, Auntie Gan. She’s so friendly and helpful. She showed us some of her readymade bunga pahar designs, as well as some custom orders that she was working on.

The readymade bunga pahar designs were decent but they needed to be adjusted because they were packed closely together. I believe the readymade ones cost about 2RM to 3.30RM. Auntie Gan stated that 1 vase can have up to 50 sticks although 40 sticks x 2 will also work. The custom made ones start from 3.50RM I believe. We picked a design that we liked and customised each component.

This is what we came up with, it costs RM4. The colour scheme is the same as our engagement gubahan trays. I think I’m just in love with the colour combination in general hehe and to think I danced around with so many other colour schemes for a year! Tip: It’s best to decide on a décor colour scheme first. It took us about 30 minutes just to consider this so that the bunga pahar vases placed at the pelamin will not clash with the surrounding décor.

 We then checked out her bunga manggar options. I had no idea there were different designs. You can also custom order yours with coins interspersed along the stick. We selected the fan design (RM18~) and the swirl design (RM6~) in the same colours. She stated that she needed 6 weeks minimum due to a large amount of orders. We made a 50% deposit. That’s 2 more things off our checklist!

We then took the bridge to Plaza Larkin across the road. This building is air conditioned, which was a delight. Most of the shops were closed, oddly.

We headed for Kad Kahwin Cun / RNE Design on the 1st floor. Once we got in, we spent about 45 minutes just looking through about a thousand samples which were laid out freely. It seemed like we were getting nowhere due to the sheer volume of options.

So I suggested we clear one table, each pick out about 5 designs which we liked and lay them out. We would then take turns vetoing the other’s picks.

Like a little bitch, I promptly put away some cards that he brought over. Haha! But in the end, his selection was the one we agreed upon. Which one did we pick? The fiancé wants to keep this a surprise (:

Post-Wedding Update: We picked the hard cover book style one, 2nd from left of the top row!

More notable samples pictured below.

When we finally agreed on a design, the invoice was written out. They needed about 50% deposit which we lacked by far and so off we went, back across the street. We decided to try the RHB machine. We finally figured out that we needed to select the Maestro option. There is a fee of about RM5.00 I believe.

We then headed back to Kad Kahwin Cun. Kak Lin asked us to take a breather first. We soon learned why. It turns out, after checking with HQ, Kak Lin found out that the design which we had selected actually costs nearly RM9 instead of RM3+. Jauh tu. I knew all along it was too good to be true. We definitely cannot afford to spend nearly SGD$2,000 on our invitations. FYI there’s also a small design fee of RM15.

I was ready to shut down what with the construction noise from the store next to us and my throbbing headache. Luckily, my fiancé, being the level-headed one, managed to talk out our options with Kak Lin. We compromised and removed the pages inside the card. Hence, we had to squeeze our content into 2 pages i.e. onto the inside of the card itself and to print the contents in greyscale. Sad right? But it’s okay. We trust that the overall quality will still be good because we did not compromise on the front and back of the card.

When that was settled, Kak Lin told us about our free gifts. Isn’t it great finding out about free gifts you didn’t know you were entitled to? They offered to give us a guestbook and 2 buntings. We switched out the guestbook, which we have already custom ordered with From De Heart, for 20 pieces of props for the photo booth, the designs of which I picked out from about 40 options. We just need to provide them with the photo for the buntings 2 weeks prior to collection date. Awesome! So we paid them a RM1,000 deposit and went off.

We were asked to update them on the content of the card and finalise the draft by the following week. We managed to finalise this past Thursday. Processing time is 2 months for our design, which leaves us with barely enough time so they offered to let us collect half next month. InsyaAllah.

Tip: Order your cards at least 3 months in advance as you need to distribute the cards at least 4 weeks in advance. Also, to speed up the content editing process, I snapped a few pictures of the contents of the sample design that we chose, as well as another card so that we can just edit our particulars from there, along with some edits on the exact wording that we preferred. Easier than trying to write formal Malay sentences on our own (:

So off we went back to JB Sentral by cab. Oddly enough we were not made to buy a ticket or queue first and were immediately ushered into a cab despite the line of people sitting and waiting. We dropped off at the new City Square Mall across from CIQ customs. There, I had KFC for dinner. Regret. Personally, I find that the Malaysian KFC just doesn’t taste the same.

However, the fiancé, a big seafood junkie, said that the Kimdo BBQ squid, which cost him about RM20, was simply superb. Me, being the non-squid eater, found it great as well. It just melts in your mouth and is well-seasoned.

78 days to go!

Update: BTBs, it’s best to PRINT out the card draft because for some reason, the mistakes become more apparent when you are staring at paper than a screen. I had even signed off on the printed draft when I decided to stare at it again, one last time. And then I spotted it, the update to the groom’s mother’s name on page 1 was not reflected on page 2. Nasib! My goodness, I hope everything goes well. InsyaAllah.

~dah habis dah crite saya~