My "Hantaran"

Weather in KL is so hot these couple of weeks. Can you imagine our a/c at home feels like a normal fan? It made me feel uncomfortable and grumpy. But I couldn’t complain much, as I always remind myself, hell are much much hotter than this! Helluva reminder huh…?!!

Anyhooz…despite of feeling like been baked in an oven for 2 weeks, I am actually quite excited. My “prospective mother in law” had called my mother to fix the date for “merisik”. Merisik is actually a Malay word, which I can’t find the English word, where by the boy family will come to the girl’s house to have a meeting to discuss about their 2 children’s engagement day. On this day, the 2 families will get to know each other better and will give a final decision of the date, the “hantaran” (the gifts), the theme color, the venue and etc. Yes, we do give sorts of gifts to each other besides the ring for the girl. Nice huh..?

In Malay culture, the “hantaran” have to be given by odd number, and the boy gets to give lesser than the girl. For example, Ash and I are planning to choose 7 vs 9. So Ash will give me 7 trays and I will reward him 9 trays. This “ritual” will be repeated on the wedding day too. But the numbers must be higher than the engagement day numbers.

The gifts are mostly foodstuff, like fruit, chocolate, cupcake, cookies, shoe and bag, or a blouse, sunglasses and perfume but the most important and must have things are include, decorative betel leaves, Quran, and our malay traditional costume. It will be placed on a tray for each gift and will be decorated according to the color theme that has been agreed by the families.

So… I haven’t decide the gifts for Ash. I will stick with the traditional stuff, not going to be too “grand”, just will keep as simple as I possibly could. These items are in my mind,

The beige fabric is for our "akad nikah" costume. I will explain that when the day comes.

Yaaah.. that's about it. I hope everything will go as planned. Its only a matter of time.

My wedding favors

Lately, my facebook seems quiet. So I distracted my interest on my plan for my spring wedding. Al though it was unclear when or where, I still dream or plan like other normal female.

My idea of wedding favors is to give away some kind of foodstuff rather than an object gift. Well, you can say I’m a penny-pinching or “taik idung masin”, but to me, you are about to spend a lot of money for your big day, just trying to spend it wisely. Unless you are a billionaire heiress!

The actual reason why I chose foodstuff is because, if let say you have left over, you can give it away to your neighbors, to your little cousins or maybe a “sedekah” to surau, and at the same time you feel good about it. There won’t be a case where by you stack the entire wasted gift under your bed, and recycle it when your daughter gets married!

At first I was thinking colorful cupcake or mini cupcake but my mother wasn’t that agree. She said something about my hometown, Sarawakian famous sweet delegacy, Kek Lapis. (Layer cake) It was a good idea, because it represents me as a Sarawakian and I am marrying a guy from the west coast. Since the core pattern of the cake can be custom made, my idea is to ask them to make a heart shape and write a Terima Kasih, as in English, Thank You in the middle of it. And this is surely a bit costly lah! And I’m not sure if they can actually craft the appreciation speech in the middle of the cake.

That’s when I decided to find other option. So I found this! It is a various shape of butter cookie with cute colorful decorative sugarpaste on top. The cookie can be butter cookie, or oatmeal, or chocolate cookie, and of course the appreciation speech on it. It will be packed 2 pieces in one package.

The packaging for this kind of favors doesnt really need fancy one. You can just wrap it with transparent cookie wrapper and tie it with a colourful ribbon!

My wedding dress

I just got an idea semalam, macam mana nak design my wedding dress. I took a few ideas from existing wedding dress then i satukan semua idea. I ni ada idea, tapi i tak tau canne nak sketch. What i always do, i explain my idea to my friend, Bern, then dia akan sketch kan untuk i. Below are few pictures of my dream wedding dress.

The design will be something like this, since i think almost semua bride kat Malaysia will wear a sempit dresses with a corset inside dan dress panjang potongan duyung. Dress di atas memang akan ada corset juga cuma the different is bahagian bawah dress adalah kembang, ala ala fairy tale princess! So, this is the look of the inside of my dress. Untuk bahagian atas i will combine a kebaya style and a cheong sam neckline. I wont put a too conservative touch on the dress sebab my kebaya actually berlengan pendek. Something like this,

Now, the only thing that im worry is, tak boleh jumpa the rightand good tailor!