New Friends and Old Favorites

On May 17th I observed and helped out with a charity fundraiser for Children’s Hospital.  Niki and her staff with Blue Danube Productions showed me how they trouble shoot various audio/visual problems as they arise and I was also able to network with the event planner Christine Leahy.  The event featured a current Children’s Hospital patient, the group Steves Songs and over 100 enthusiastic children who had a blast singing and dancing to the music.

The May meeting of the Association of Bridal Consultants (ABC) was held at Newcastle Golf Course.  The meeting had a fun twist for all involved by being an actual wedding for a deserving military couple.  Two highlights for those couples planning their wedding:

1. Don’t be afraid of seafood! We were served Chilian Sea Bass, which is the first time I’ve ever had it, and it was AMAZING. And I’m not the biggest fish fan either.

2. Couple Q&A. As an ABC member I had never met the couple, but myself and the rest of the members in attendance couldn’t stop laughing as the couple answered important questions such as “who snores the loudest” and “who’s the most frugal?” The Q&A was a definitely fun addition to the reception and gave the guests a good insight into the couple.

This past Saturday, May 31st I had the pleasure of working with the staff of Tony’s Catering for a wedding at the Fairview Club.  The couple chose the beautiful and bold colors of navy blue and orange balanced with ivory.  The couple also decided to have a 4-tier wedding cake with one tier being carrot cake, a Focus Events favorite

Check out these photos from the reception below:

 

Stay tuned for details about lunch at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in downtown Seattle as well as a tasting at 12 Baskets Catering in Kirkland.

Cirque Du Soleil

As many in the Seattle area know by now, the Cirque Du Soleil show Corteo is in town. Lucky me, my husband got us tickets for my birthday and it was amazing. The music, the choreography, the acrobatics, the costumes, the lighting - every detail was amazing, breath taking and had fabulous humor thrown in as well. Highlights from the show included the little person they attached huge balloons and floated around the audience (I couldn’t stop giggling) and the Master of Ceremonies who could whistle like I’ve never heard before. If you can go don’t miss it!

Myself and Kerra Breum of “I Do” Weddings have been in talks of merging our businesses to become a better event planning service for our clients. Kerra would focus on weddings, I would focus on business events, her marketing skills will be a great compliment to my organization skills, and overall would be great to have someone to always bounce ideas off of. This is currently only in the works so stay tuned for more information.

Last week I met with Liz and Erin of A Small Victory. I will be volunteering for their non-profit organization by setting up their charity garage sale and helping them procure items for their May 2009 auction and dinner. All proceeds from the events will be used to create additional bereavement kits that will be sent to parents who have lost a child through miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal loss. A Small Victory is the only organization of it’s kind currently available in the United States. It takes $100.00 to put together and mail each kit at this time. If you would like to help by donating an item for the garage sale contact me. If you’d like to make a monetary donation to support A Small Victory please check out their Web site and contact them directly.

On Saturday, my husband and I drove up to Snohomish to Jardin Del Sol where I met with the owner, Melanie. I am planning the July Washington Association of Bridal Consultants meeting and Melanie has offered her venue to host the event. The space is a beautiful outdoor garden space with patio and a tented area for eating. I’m looking forward to pulling all of the details together and will be focusing on making sure our wedding clients are getting all the pre-wedding services they need such as pre-marital counseling or meeting with a nutritionist. 

Stay tuned next week for my experience shadowing Niki with Blue Danube Productions as well as May’s ABC Meeting.

Networking, Networking and a Wedding

This past Saturday was spent coordinating the wedding of a fabulous couple. Their wedding and reception was at the Rainier Chapter House (otherwise known as the DAR House) on Capital Hill. The groom is a graphic artist and they had many personalized touches incorporating their wedding logo into their pink, black and white wedding theme as you’ll see from the photos below.

Ravishing Radish provided a delicious vegetarian dinner while Judy from Tallant House baked a vegan cake – actually tasty and the frosting was incredibly yummy. Alex with Flowers on 15th provided beautiful pink flowers and even went back to his store to get organic flowers for the cake which was a perfect touch.

In other business news, I was invited by Angela Shen with Savor Seattle Food Tours to a business network (BNI) that she’s a member of. I went on Tuesday for their visitor day and it was a really great experience. Everyone was incredibly nice and supportive plus many people were excited to see an event planner possibly join the group. On Friday, I did a one-on-one session with Brian who is part of the Membership Committee for the group to see if I’d be a good fit for their chapter. I will continue to visit their meeting and hope that it will become a great resource for me to grow my business as well as learn to be a better networker.

I also had the pleasure of sitting down with Niki the owner of Blue Danube Productions and will hopefully get to shadow her for a day in May. Her company does audio and visual displays for events and from what I’ve seen and heard she is certainly one of the best in the business and I am excited to learn from her.

Stay tuned next week for how my birthday went as well as a possible new business partnership venture that I’m looking into.

Good Food, Good Company

What a crazy week. Monday started off with coffee with Angela Shen, the owner of Savor Seattle Food Tour (see last week post for more information). Angela is such a fabulous woman and a great person to network with. It is always wonderful to talk with other business owners and share ideas and information. Thanks to Angela I have a few more business connections that I can hopefully utilize as I continue to grow my business.

I wrapped up Monday evening with the monthly Washington Association of Bridal Consultants meeting. The meeting was held at the Lake Union Yacht Club, a beautiful setting with a water view. Prop Gallery really enhanced the space using sheer fabric draped across the ceiling and Ravishing Radish provided a great selection of food plus we had yummy cupcakes from Trophy Cupcakes. And of course all of the folks in the wedding industry are always great to catch up with and see how their years are lining up.

Wednesday evening was spent with clients at a great tasting provided the Landmark Convention Center in downtown Tacoma. The food was really great, especially a pasta station where you picked the pasta and sauce and they heated it up right there. Then they had a dessert station where they were making banana foster and cherry jubilee sauces to go over ice cream. It was fabulous to watch and delicious. They had 3 foot flames at one point while flambeing the liquors.

My clients are having their wedding on the Roof Garden which is a huge deck and beautiful view of the south Puget Sound. An excellent location for their summer wedding. Below are a few pictures from the Landmark.

 

Stay tuned next week for pictures and details from a wedding I will be coordinating on Saturday at the DAR House on Capitol Hill.

A Day to Savor

On Saturday, my husband and I went on a Savor Seattle Food Tour through Pike Place Market. Savor Seattle was started last year by Angela Shen who I met when she was just getting started. I held on to her information since the tour sounded really cool and recently got around to booking one.

Let me start by saying the tour was amazing! And it just happened to be the best weather day ever with temperatures getting into the 70s! I won’t go into full detail about the tour because you really have to experience it yourself but it runs about 2 hours and you get samples from 9 different locations throughout the market (sometimes multiple samples from the same place). Our tour guide Tim was funny and full of facts and history about the market (not to mention he knows all of the vendors and owners at the market). Everyone wears a small headphone so that you can hear Tim talk as we walk through the market. It made all of the difference to be able to hear him crystal clear in such a busy and loud space. 

Below are some pictures from the tour and the yummy samples – beverages, desserts, spices, cheese and dishes – plenty to keep me full until dinner. I’m looking forward to their future Belltown and International District Tours and would definitely go on the Pike Place tour again.

Stay tuned next week for news from the Association of Bridal Consultants Meeting and a tasting at the Landmark in Tacoma.

What Focus Events Has Been Up To

I continue to meet many wonderful couples through planning weddings and am looking forward to the experiences of the coming year. You can checkout photos from some of my previous weddings on my Web site.

A couple of weekends ago my husband Reilly and I did a photoshoot with Jack Young, a wonderful photographer. Every few years it is my goal to get photos of us so that we can capture that moment in our lives for us to look back on as we grow older. We spent a couple of hours walking around South Lake Union which is a great up and coming area of Seattle. Checkout a few of our photos.

 

As I continue to grow my business I am hoping to meet other professionals who are in a similar situation as myself. I’ve been a member of the Association of Bridal Consultants for almost a year now and over the past month I have been building a profile with Microsoft’s Vendor program and hope to gain business through them. This week I also set up a profile on Biznik, a Seattle small business network.

Something that I’m proud of is helping out with Web sites that could use a facelift. I am not a web designer in any sense of the word but I dabble and I’m okay at what I do. I built my own Web site based on the logo I had designed (by a real designer ) and recently gave the Washington Association of Bridal Consultants Web site a complete redo. Check it out at www.washingtonabc.com. Also, just launched last week I built a new Web site for a good friend of mine who is starting her own wedding planning business. Check her new site out at www.idoweddingsandspecialevents.com. Below are screen shots of their home pages.

 

Stay tuned next week for Kristin’s experience with Savor Seattle Food Tour through Pike Place Market.

The Blogging Begins

Many things have been happening at Focus Events this past year, and blogging is just one of the latest new things that I will be focusing on.

Check back for photos, what Focus Events has been up to and planning information. Have a great day!

Kristin Pittman
Focus Events
Owner