BREAKING NEWS!! HSN Kicks Off 99 Series Launch

I’m very excited to announce that my book,” 99 Things Brides Wish They Knew Before Planning Their Wedding”  is #1 on Amazon and iPad in the category of wedding planning books!!!  Help me make the best seller list by
downloading it now.  Click here to download.

My Book!

 

 

Due to the demand and hype around the pioneering and revolutionary Book Series I have written for The 99 Series,   The Home Shopping Network is kicking off the launch September 3rd, before the World Launch date of October 6, 2010! 

 

This is great news for all of you who are excited to get reading!! There are a bunch of options, and you can do one, or all… today!! 

The Series encompasses a roster of inspiring, personal and business development books that have ninety-nine tips in each book, all in a pocket-size format that contains the best ‘need to know’ information. No more reading through hundreds of pages to get that one paragraph that pertains to your particular issue. The ninety-nine concise bullet points make it so easy to get right to the point you need! 

 You can buy the 10-Pack Gift Set! This is an incredible option if you’re looking for a great deal on some incredible books in ALL AREAS of Women’s Life! This is also a great birthday gift or holiday gift for the special woman in your life. Why not surprise her with an email alert that you sent her 10 books to her Kindle or iPad?! How fun!! 

 

You can buy the 5-Pack Gift Set: Love and Money Series for Women! 

 

You can buy my book alone! In case you forgot, Or you can buy any of the incredible books available by the amazing authors in my Series! 

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No matter what you choose, you can purchase books TODAY on a Sony E-Reader, Amazon Kindle, Ipad, Kobo, Nook, or Cybook Opus or even upload the pdf to your computer ( on October 6th)!! 

We are proud to say, that we are the FIRST-EVER Series to come out and launch digitally, on a  digital platform… where the future of reading is headed! How GREEN are we?  

Our World launch is still September 27, 2010… that hasn’t changed. 

Don’t forget to WATCH our launch on The Home Shopping Channel: 

Airtimes: (EST)

9/3 – 7 am 

9/4- 4am,8am,12pm & 5pm

9/5- 7am & 6pm

9/6- 4am & 2pm

9/19- 5am

For those in Canada, you can watch it on www.hsn.com

Don’t forget, if you buy a Sony E-Reader from HSN during our launch, you get our 10-Book Bundle for FREEEEEEE!! 

We are all excited for you to get cozy with a good cup of coffee, our books,  and learn start learning! 

 

Top Three Wedding Dances

Wedding dances are the hottest wedding trend ever!  From the bridal party making their entrance into the ceremony to the first dance at the reception, the surprise factor is what gives it the WOW.  What once was a boring and awkward moment for guests, is now one of the most fun way of expressing the personalities of the bride and groom.  It’s an anything goes wedding world!

Here are my personal favorite top three surprise dances:

Number #3:

Jill and Kevin’s wedding entrance video went viral.  They put the view to a good cause by accepting donations to go toward ending domestic violence.  You can learn more about that by visiting Jill and Kevin’s website:

Number #2:

This couple recreates the famous dance by Patrick Swayze & Jennifer Gray from Dirty Dancing, complete with a custom-made dress for the bride:

This rates my number one spot in the best wedding reception surprises:

Which one was your favorite, and why?  Have you been to a wedding recently that had a surprise or wow factor?  What was it?  I would love to hear from you.

Happy Planning,

Pam Archer

DIY Ideas for Kids Tables at Weddings

Inviting young children to your wedding is a personal decision.  Some brides opt for an every child left behind affair, others have special connections with the children and it is very important for them to be included.  If you are a teacher and couldn’t imagine your wedding without your students in attendance, it is understandable that you would want them there.  

When children are invited, be prepared to be upstaged by their loud, off-the-cuff comments and questions during the ceremony.  Don’t be surprised by a few of them bursting into tears or, screaming fits.   It’s tough to be a kid and be expected to sit still and quiet.  It’s best to hire a sitter.  Hire  teenagers or adults who will supervise the children.  Having a designated place for them to have their own celebration is a wise idea.  Provide fun things for them to do.  For outdoors, games, bubbles, balls, anything that would be of interest to them, work well.  A table covered in craft paper, with crayons provided gives them something to do while they have to be seated. 

The Kids Room featured here is in a ballroom down the hall from the main ballroom. The theme was a bright and cheery, playful room, built around a beach theme. The centerpieces were sand buckets with bright, paper daisies and bear grass.  Sand was mounded at the base to allow for sea creatures, shells, and starfish accents. 

Cable Photography

Each child had a placemat with a bride and groom on them, along with wedding related games.  The bride and groom got to keep the colored creations from their young guests as a memento of their wedding.  Crayons were provided, as was Play Doh for each child.Wash cloths  doubled as napkins and good clean up after eating messy cupcakes.  Silly Bands Sea Creatures, made darling napkin rings.

Koozies were adorned with beach themed, foam, stickers.  The Koozies held glow bracelets for the bride and groom get away. 

Chicken nuggets and fries were served for their dinner, and cupcakes with sugar worms were served for dessert.  What kid would prefer prime rib over chicken nuggets and cupcakes!  Terra cotta pots were painted green and turned upside down to serve as a base for the pot saucers.  The saucers made cut trays to hold the cupcakes.  Beach towels, with fish on them made a sassy table cover, and were easy to clean up afterwards, just wash and dry. 

 

With some imagination, and not a lot of money, you can make your young guests happy, and their parents even happier, because they will be free to enjoy your wedding and reception. 

Wonderful sources for purchasing items for children are Big Lots, Michaels, Hobby Lobby, Oriental Trading Company (on-line), The Dollar Store, The Dollar Tree, and Dollar General Store. 

For more money-saving and wedding planning tips, click on the book, now only $ .99 on iPhone: 

Wedding Day – Flower Explosion

WHEW! We made it!  Jerrica and Anthony are married and on their honeymoon.

We started unloading the truck at 8:00 am at The Martha Washington Inn.

Seventeen of us worked as fast and meticulously as we could, taking only a thirty minute lunch break.

The wedding gazebo was laden with Dendrobium orchids from Thailand, peonies from Israel, garden roses, hybrid tea roses, and spray roses from Ecuador.  All of these flowers were accustomed to the heat, so the 94 degree temperature wasn’t too much for them to remain beautiful. 6,000 fragrant rose petals covered the aisle!

After the ceremony, guests were directed through the courtyard pathway into the hotel. We set up a separate ballroom for the children, with decor that would be fun for them.

The ballroom was breathtaking! The champagne, ivory, and taupe color scheme was exceptional against the classic decor of the room. Ken Sharples, from Cover the Top Party Rentals, provided the linens for the tables. Antique crystal chandeliers held the diamond crystal draping over the dance floors. The windows were also draped with the crystals. Uplites accented Dendrobium orchids in vases, topped with balls of roses. Each of these centerpieces had 150-180 roses in the balls.

Susie Johnson, from Susie’s Wedding Cakes, made the magnificent wedding cake. She also designed and made the adorable groom’s cake. The cake was patterned after their dog, Carmen.

All of the long hours and hard work were worth it when Jerrica entered the ballroom before the wedding, to see what we had done. She looked at me and started to cry. She was ecstatic with the beauty of it, and said it was better than she had imagined. We love it when the bride is overwhelmed. We feel that we have done our job when she gasps and cries!

It was a pleasure to work with Jerrica. She has exquisite taste and style.
Several hundred man hours later, the dream was reality. Hear are some summary comments from three of our amazing staff members, including Maria LaBarbera, my beautiful daughter, and business partner.  Joe, my son-in-law, is invaluable to our business, as is my husband, Chuck.

A special word of thanks for all of my staff, Maria and Joe LaBarbera, Chuck Archer, Abby Simmons, Adrianne Cowan, Phyllis Neurdenberg, Sara Watson, Loriann Calcott, Ann Collins, Alison Russell, Mary Cargle, Tony and Jamie Williams, Lea Williams, Tim Smith. and John and Sherree Williams.

Congratulations to Jerrica and Anthony!  We wish you many years of health and happiness together.

Day Three-Wedding Flower Explosion

I’m so late getting finished with the work on the wedding today that it is already tomorrow!

I forgot to take my flip camera to the venue this afternoon, and this morning was so nuts, that there was no time to use it in the workshop, however I did take a couple of snap shots of the ballroom as we started set-up tonight.

It is going to far exceed any of our visions, I do believe. The room is looking outrageous and it doesn’t even have a single bloom placed yet!
The only downside to any of it is the oppressive heat. It is supposed to be 94 degrees tomorrow and very high humidity. The ceremony will be outdoors, so we will be working hard to keep the flowers misted and shaded.

Their will be a beverage table, with water, lemonade, and punch to help to keep people hydrated and cooled.

It will be Sunday before I will be back on here to give you the whole story and video.

The day starts early tomorrow (today) and will be Sunday before it’s over. I’m soooo excited…that I just can’t hide it!!!

Day Two-Wedding Flower Explosion

It’s been a very long day today. We starting working at 8:00 am and called it a night at 10:30 pm.

I was assured that flowers would be at the workshop by NOON today. They didn’t arrive. We kept wondering when they were coming. At 4:40, I received a call from my husband that when he came home from work there were six boxes of flowers baking in the hot sun at our front door since 10:30 this morning, at 92 degrees! These flower brokers had our work address!

So it was On the phone again for me today to the first wholesaler. They re-shipped, for the third time, to cover their replacements for the wrong flowers that they sent. Those are due in tomorrow, priority.

The second flowers shipper got it wrong, too. They had to re-ship and that shipment didn’t arrive at all.

My husband brought the shipment from home, and we opened the boxes. The wedding’s color scheme is white, champagne, creamy blush, and pale sandy peach. Most of what was in the box were orange and orange, yellows. Not able to use!@

Finally, after all the phone calls to get things corrected, we prayerfully are expecting all of the right ones to come in tomorrow.

Other than a few burnt fingers from hot glue, and having to call a repairman for the breakdown of the lift on the refrigerator truck, we are doing fairly well.

Tomorrow is a super long day. We will work
in the workshop all morning and afternoon, then go after that to The Martha Washington Inn to begin hauling supplies.

Here is a short video clip of the day shift at work.

Day One – Wedding Flower Explosion

Planning a wedding is a process.  It takes many, many hours of time to design a dream wedding, and even more hours to bring it to life.

We’ve been working for several months on a wedding that is taking place this Saturday at The Martha Washington Inn, in Abingdon, Virginia.  We are so excited, because we were given lots of creative freedom, and we have fun things to work with.  This is when we do our best work.  The bride and her mom have been super to work with, and I’ve grown to love them both.   We can’t wait for this wedding!  It’s going to be incredible.  Move over Platinum Weddings, because you don’t have a thing on this one.

I thought it might be fun to journal in this blog regarding our experiences “behind-the-scenes” this week.  Today is Day One.

Today started at 6:30 am with a call to the local wholesaler to see if the truck bearing part of our flowers had arrived from Miami.  Then, it was talking with our driver regarding picking up the refrigerator truck, and making arrangements for him to pick up the first shipment.  Workers arrived at 9:00 and began filling the buckets with water and floral preservative, in preparation for the flowers.  We began unpacking flowers, stripping roses of their thorns and leaves, and trimming each and every stem of the more than 3, 000 blooms.

FedEX arrived with the flowers from Ecuador shortly after.  Another 1,000 flowers will be here tomorrow.  So far, one worker injured her foot in a fall.  We pray it isn’t broken, but she definitely needs x-rays.   A few of us have bleeding fingers from stray thorns, but that’s all in a day’s work for a floral designer.  There were a few problems with the wrong varieties of roses being shipped, and some substitutions that were unacceptable, so that was several more hours of phone calls to get replacements shipped.  It’s all par for the course.

The flowers have made it to East Tennessee from around the world.  Israel, Ecuador, Holland, and various other countries are represented in this mass effort to put together this picture-perfect wedding.

I took some Flip video today, so that you can see what 3,000 roses and peonies look like.

Be sure to check back for video from tomorrow, and every day, culminating with the grande event on Saturday.