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Real Jewish Brides: How Alexandra Popped The Question To Her Bridal Party

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Alexandra will be marrying Jordan on 26th May 2019 at The Grove in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. Click here to read all Alexandra’s planning posts to date.

THREE FACTS: (1) Alexandra and Jordan met in college and have been together ever since. (2) They are planning a romantic fairy tale garden wedding inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream – LOVE! (3) Alexandra’s wearing Galia Lahav for the big day – one of our absolute fave Israeli designers!


Popping the Question!

After the groom pops the question, it’s now the bride’s turn to ask… her bridal party! There are many different ways to ask your best ladies to stand by your side on your big day. You can send an ask via post or over the phone, ask each bridesmaid individually in person, or gather your crew and ask all at once!

For me, I wanted to see the look on everyone’s faces and cherish the moment as a group. After searching high and low for spots that fit my desired ambiance and budget, I decided to host a brunch on my parent’s patio. I spent a lot of time planning and wanted to share my tips with the STG community!

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A Monique Lhuillier Bride for a Nature-Inspired Jewish Wedding at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois, USA

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We love a good garden wedding. And we love it even more when a couple really goes all out in making the most of their natural surroundings, like Jane, an actor and a voiceover artist, and Adam, who works in digital distribution.

Elegance meets rustic in this beautiful Jewish wedding, inspired by the pair’s love of nature and celebration of the changing of the season from summer to fall at their September celebration, from a seasonal, produce-driven menu (incorporating recipes the foodie duo put together themselves!), earthy clay kiddush cups, anda gorgeous painted ketubah reflecting their love of nature and the changing seasons by artist Jessica Kraft, purchased from Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor  Ketubah.com.

And speaking of beautiful wedding design, Jane and Adam were lucky enough to work with one of our fave

luxury stationers, Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor E.Y.I. Love, on their invitations. We’re obsessed with the minimalist chic invitations they came up with together, featuring gold foiled text and gilt edging, a custom cactus print envelope lining, and forest green calligraphy on each envelope. If you love the look as much as we do, be sure to enter the competition we’re running to win your wedding stationery from E.Y.I Love. It closes in a few days – so make sure you don’t miss out!

Now over to Jane, who looked stunning in her beaded strapless princess gown by Monique Lhullier, which she found at wonderful Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor The Wedding Club in South Kensington, London…

Jiho Park from Lilly Photography and Hunter Floyd from Hunter Floyd Films captured all the emotion and elegance of the day so perfectly. Enjoy!


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A Garden Wedding

Jane, the bride: We got married at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, in the USA (2 September, 2018). The venue is located close to the bride’s family’s home. Though then it seemed like a far-away dream, when Jane was around 7, she told her parents that she “would marry either a South-African or British man and get married at the Chicago Botanic Garden.” And so it was, she married a British man and got married at the Botanic Garden!

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A Suzanne Neville Bride for a Destination Jewish Wedding at the Great Synagogue and Villa Miani, Rome, Italy

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We always love seeing what wedding pros choose for their own big days. On one hand, they’ve got a leg up knowing all the ins and outs of the industry. But on the other, when you’re surrounded by amazing wedding vendors day in and day out, how do you choose?!

Today’s beautiful bride Laura is a London-based wedding planner, and we’re not surprised that she and Moshi, a financial adviser, picked a whole roster full of Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendors for their beautiful destination wedding in Rome: from ultra-creative videographer Denee Motion (love that drone footage!) to a 10-piece band by the amazing Totem to a beautiful, colorful ketubah by artist Veronique Jonas from Ketubah.com, they went for some of the very best of the best.

And then there’s Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor Italian Wedding Company. Being a planner’s planner is no easy job, but Stefania and Vanessa handled it with aplomb, helping Laura realize the wedding of her dreams despite her planning from abroad and speaking not a word of Italian.

Photographer Paul Toeman captured all the emotion of the day — not to mention the gorgeous setting — so perfectly, and we can’t get enough of the couple’s adorable wedding hashtag, #moshandbecks.

We’ll let Laura, who looked stunning in Suzanne Neville, fill you in on the rest…


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How We Met

Laura, the bride: He was sitting next to a friend’s husband one year and asked who was sitting next to his wife. After cancelling what would have been our first date and re-connecting a year later, we met up and the rest is history!

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An Alexandra Grecco Bride for a City Chic Jewish Wedding with Bright Florals at Tribeca 360, New York City

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There’s nothing like an NYC wedding. The views. The awesome streetscape photo ops. The cobblestones. And did we mention the views?!

Alie and Mike’s downtown Manhattan wedding at Tribeca 360 does not disappoint — they really did get views of the city from every angle, and we can’t stop swooning over the NYC-perfect portraits Kathleen Fox Photography shot of the couple in the beyond picturesque neighborhood surrounding the venue.

The views inside were pretty fantastic too, especially with that lovely floral chuppah — we love the bright playful colors, and it just goes to show that you don’t need an unlimited floral budget to craft a memorable floral design for your canopy.

They also had a gorgeous papercut ketubah from Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor Ruth Mergi, and rather than the traditional text Alie and Mike went for a modern version that focused on marriage as entering into a partnership — we love that they were able to incorporate their own values this way!

We also love that Alie emphasizes a topic we feel pretty strongly about: day-of coordinators. Even if you’re a Type A DIY-er like Alie, a day-of coordinator can give you that extra reassurance to enjoy the big day worry-free. From dealing with the venue to making sure the day ran to schedule to saving some of the (delicious) wedding food for the coupe in their bridal suite afterward, these two can’t stop singing the praises of their coordinator, and they say hiring her was some of the best money they spent in planning the wedding.

Now over to Alie, who looked beautiful in her dress by Alexandra Grecco…

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A Manhattan Venue

Alie, the bride: We got married at Tribeca 360 in downtown Manhattan. We live in NYC and are both from the area, so we knew we wanted to get married in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

We loved the views of the city from every angle, and liked how the space was set up to flow easily from ceremony to cocktail hour to reception. We also liked that food and tables, settings, etc. came with the venue, so that we didn’t also have to find a caterer. (And people are still telling us how good the food was!)

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An Essense of Australia Bride for a Jew-ish Wedding at Poundon House, near Bicester, Buckinghamshire, UK

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One of the things we most love here at Smashing the Glass is hearing how we’ve helped couples plan the Jew-ish wedding of their dreams. So when lovely bride Philippa (who just happens to be a member of Smashing The Glass’s Brides Club) told us she found STG while looking for interfaith wedding inspo, it melted Team STG’s collective heart — and even more so when she told us reading other brides’ writeups of their Jew-ish weddings “made me realise we weren’t the only ones out there!”

So you can only imagine out delight in finding out that she and groom Jerome booked their officiant, Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor Rabbi Paul Glantz, via STG! Rabbi Paul helped the couple — Philippa is Christian, Jerome’s Jewish — craft an ultra-personal ceremony that reflected both of their backgrounds and traditions, complete with plentiful description of the Jewish parts of the ceremony so everyone could follow along, plus an explanatory order of service crafted by the bride. This is such a smart idea if you know you’ll be having guests who are unfamiliar with Jewish wedding traditions!

We also love that toward the end of the ceremony, after the rabbi recited the traditional Jewish seven blessings in Hebrew, the couple invited some friends and close family to give seven humanist blessings in English!

And with Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor the Function Band performing, this wedding was no slouch from an entertainment standpoint either. The Function Band are renowned far and wide for their ability to get the party started, and we’re not surprised that guest after guest came up to the couple to tell them how awesome the band was!

We haven’t even gotten to the fab rustic elegance aesthetic, the gorgeous floral chuppah, or Philippa’s stunner of a dress from Essense of Australia, but we’ll leave it to the bride — with some support from the fab photography by Pascal from Reportage, and videography by Cedar House Productions — to fill you in on all of that…


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How we met

Philippa, the bride: Jerome and I both work in the media industry – I’m a producer at a creative agency making commercials and promotional content, and Jerome is head of strategic development at a creative studio, working in VR and CGI.

We met through a mutual friend whom Jerome lived with at the time and we finally got together on a big group trip to Ibiza where we started kissing in the middle of a Hardwell gig at Ushuaia! We didn’t stop kissing after that. It didn’t take long for us to realise that it was meant to be and we moved into together after 3 months.

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