One excuse: Wedding season! Okay, there’s no excuse! We’re back and ready to blog! Over the next few weeks we’ll be blogging about a few fabulous Central Oregon Wedding Vendors [FINALLY], some gorgeous real weddings [the reason we haven’t been posting as often as we should!] and a little update on how my personal wedding planning is going!

As I’m working on details for clients, emails, blogging and phone calls I can’t help, but wish I had a plate of something sweet! Though I won’t get to have any of these sweet treats today, I have to tell you about Bend Cookie Company! Bend Cookie Company creates custom designed cookies for all life’s celebrations!  They create personalized, hand-decorated cookies for your special day.  Each of their sugar cookies is made with care, each batch made from scratch and hand-decorated one cookie at a time.  They also offer a full line of gourmet cookies.  Let Bend Cookie Company make your celebration even sweeter! Read on to see pictures of some of their delicious treats and learn more about their company!

Champagne: How did Bend Cookie Company begin?

Bend Cookie Company: “...we should open a cookie company…”

Those words were spoken on the street outside a small bakery in Cotacachi, Ecuador after eating a not so tasty treat. Our time in Ecuador was part of a 2 year adventure, taking us to 8 countries and 12 U.S. states, traveling with our 2 school aged children. The trip was part of a lifestyle change that ended corporate careers and re-focused our lives on those things that are important.

After returning to the states, in the middle of a recession and in a new city with few job opportunities, we decided to start a small business that would be fun, allow us to work together, and provide an opportunity to personally connect to our customers…something our corporate careers did not provide.

So, Bend Cookie Company was born.

Champagne: What sets your company apart from others?

Bend Cookie Company: We provide personalized, hand decorated cookies for all life’s celebrations. Each of our sugar cookies is made with care, each batch made from scratch and hand decorated one cookie at a time. We pride ourselves on the personal connection we make with our customers, and how with the customer’s input, we can create customized, one-of-a-kind cookies just for them.  We also carry a full line of delicious gourmet cookies, each one made by hand using only the finest all-natural ingredients without preservatives, baked fresh for each order.

Champagne: Besides cookies, what’s your personal specialty?

Bend Cookie Company: For us, it’s all cookies, all the time!

Champagne: Can you ship your cookies?

Bend Cookie Company: Yes!  We ship nationwide.

Champagne: What’s your favorite part of Central Oregon weddings?

Bend Cookie Company: Our favorite part of working with the bridal couple is to create that one-of-a-kind wedding cookie that completely reflects their personality and style, and allows their guests to take a little piece of their wedding day home with them.  We are also seeing a trend developing where the couple is opting for “Groom’s Cookies”  instead of a Groom’s cake, and where the parents of the groom are providing a rehearsal dinner cookie favors as well. 

Champagne: What’s your favorite dessert?

Bend Cookie Company: Our Toasted Toffee Pecan cookie - when I took my first bite, I heard angels sing!  Our kids second that!

Champagne: What inspires you?

Bend Cookie Company: As the cookie artist, I get my inspiration everywhere: nature, fashion, pop-culture, art, and fellow artists.  As the baker and flavor developer, Sean likes to mix it up and gets his inspiration from traditional, eclectic and international flavor profiles. 

Champagne: What has been your most unique request for cookie design?

Bend Cookie Company: I would have to say the cookies for high-tech gadgets:  Playstation controllers, iPods and cameras.  I also created a “Naughty Negligee” cookie tray for a bachelorette party that was adorable!

Champagne: What do you do when you’re not doing what you do?

Bend Cookie Company: We spend time as a family enjoying all the activities that Central Oregon has to offer, in addition to watching our kids’ sporting activities. 

Champagne: Anything else you’d like our readers to know?

Bend Cookie Company: We are a local, family-owned business dedicated to bringing beautifully decorated and delicious cookies to everyone.  We would love to make cookies for your next special event or celebration, big or small!  Check out our website or see a more complete picture gallery on our Bend Cookie Company Facebook Fan Page.

Champagne: Thank you, Gina, for sharing more about Bend Cookie Company! We can’t wait to have more of your cookies soon!

Cheers,

Mandi, Rachelle & the Champagne team

Last Saturday, July 24th, 2010 Lacey and Jonathan got married! It was a beautiful, some what… HOT day, but everything about the day was perfect! Lacey and Jonathan share a love that just radiates the room! They had me tearing up all day! We were so lucky to have been a part of their wonderful day! Their amazing photographers, Alice and Josh of Mosca Photo have already put up a sneak peak of the day!

A huge thank you to all of the vendors that made the wedding such a success!
Photographer: Mosca Photo
Getting Ready Location: Hotel Vintage Plaza
Ceremony and Reception Location: Portland World Trade Center
Hair and Makeup: AJ’s Hair Design & Makeup
Coordinator: Mandi Downs, Champagne Wedding and Event Coordination
Limo: Chariot Limousines
DJ: Bass Is Loaded
Cake: Helen Bernhard Bakery
Flowers: A Floral Affair
Chair Covers: Avery’s Chair Covers and More
Videographer: Luminous Productions

Check out their sneak peak on Mosca Photo‘s blog! We’ll be sharing more from their wedding in a few months, as well as many more weddings Champagne has been working on this summer! Stay tuned!!

Cheers,

Mandi, Rachelle & the Champagne team

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again and again, your wedding day flies by and having a videographer to capture the moments that you may have missed or want to remember forever is necessity! Having a professional photographer is one thing you can’t go without, but when you want to go back and hear your vows and the sound of your grandmas voice, there’s nothing that preserves that better than a professional videographer. Ambient Sky is sharing with us today a little about why video is so important and some to die for samples! Enjoy!

Champagne: How would you describe your videography style?

Ambient Sky: Highly stylized, artistic with a cinematic flair.  Engaging, heartfelt and timeless.

Wedding Day Highlight

Champagne: How did you get into videography?

Ambient Sky: Our backgrounds are pretty varied.  Between the two of us we have extensive experience in Fashion Design, Graphic Design, Event Planning, Photography, Audio Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Music Theory and Composition.  About 8 years ago Scott decided to go back to school where he studied Multimedia, Graphic Design and Filmmaking. Amanda’s love of weddings and events lead to the idea of creating wedding films.  The more we got into it the more we realized it was the perfect blend of our talents and our passions and we love working together.

Wedding Trailer

Champagne: Often times we have people tell us, well my parents have never watched their wedding video, I doubt I would. What’s your response to this?

Ambient Sky: Wedding video as an industry has evolved incredibly fast in the last 10 years from virtually unwatchable home video, fly on the wall style wedding videos, to a true cinematic experience like we offer with our Couture Wedding Films™.  With our films, the days of the wedding video that never gets watched is over.  Our clients regularly rave about how many times they watch their wedding film.  We pride ourselves on the timeless experience we create for our clients and their families.  We spend a great deal of time and effort on each wedding film making sure it’s something that they will want to watch again and again.  Our advanced style of shooting and our engaging edits make our vision of a wedding film unlike anything most couples have ever seen before.

Same Day Edit
The short highlight of the wedding day that we show at the reception.  One of our most popular offerings.

Champagne: What sets you apart from other videographers?

Ambient Sky: Everything!  Our creativity in storytelling, in shooting, in editing.  Our sense of the moment, and capturing the really important ones when they present themselves thru-out the day, then weaving these together with the rest of the days events into a feature style wedding film.

Being the trend setters of the wedding film industry in the area, it is somewhat flattering to see our style and techniques show up in the work of many of our competitors.  However, it’s our internal drive that keeps us always learning, evolving and pushing the envelope in our wedding films.  We are always looking for a better way to shoot, to edit and to tell our clients stories in a more engaging way.  We introduced the Portland/Vancouver markets to the concept of a highly stylized and enthralling Same Day Edit video shown on a big screen at the reception.  It provides the couple, their family and friends with an entertaining vignette of the days events that is unparalleled.  We were even the first wedding filmmakers in Portland to blog!  Check ours out often, as we are proud of every film we produce which means we are always filling the blog up with our latest and greatest.

All aspects of our company focus on the style and elegance that we portray in our films.  You won’t see pictures of our cameras or our gear in our advertising.  The majority of couples we work with simply want a great wedding film.  While we do use some of the most advanced visual and audio capture equipment in the filmmaking industry they are all just tools that help us create better wedding films.

Our expertise in showing our brides in the most flattering and elegant way garnered us a WEVA Creative Excellence award in the highly competitive Bridal Spotlight category, making us the only studio in the Pacific Northwest to ever win this incredibly difficult category.  WEVA (Wedding and Event Videography Association) is an international organization that is the most prestigious in our industry to win an award from.  It’s basically our Academy awards. We’ve also won a variety of other awards including a Telly for our Fashion Style Video of Miss Oregon 2007, Kari Virding.

Bridal Elegance Film

Champagne: What do you do when you’re not doing what you do?

Ambient Sky: Try to keep up with our 3 year old daughter who is quickly becoming a force of nature.  Spend time with our friends and family.  Discovering new music and watching movies (but that’s “research” for us)!  Dancing and playing Hockey (not at the same time)!

Engagement Film

Champagne: What’s one tip or advice you have for couples as they plan their wedding?

Ambient Sky: Don’t skimp on preserving your memories.  You put so much time, money and heart into planning your day and it goes by in a flash.  Photography plays an important role but it serves an entirely different purpose in the moments it captures.  The truth is, people rarely have the emotional connection to a photo that they do to our finely crafted wedding films.  It’s not uncommon for couples visiting us to tear up while watching one of our previous clients wedding films.  And it’s not often, if ever, that people do the same looking at wedding photos of people they don’t know.  We always recommend to couples that they should prioritize both photography and a wedding film in their budget.

Champagne: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?

Ambient Sky: Our overall professionalism, passion and creativity that we bring to each wedding and event we shoot comes thru in the experiences our clients have with us and in the final movie they get to enjoy.  We are also a husband and wife team and we have great respect for marriage and family.  Having been married for 10 years now with our wedding a very distant memory, we have a very intimate connection to the value of what we provide to our clients.  Needless to say we don’t have a wedding film from our wedding because there was no one in the area creating anything worth paying for when we got married.  We don’t remember our vows, we don’t remember Amanda’s father’s performance during our ceremony, we can’t remember the toast my brother gave that brought us to tears.  If we could somehow go back and shoot and edit our own wedding film with all the experience and knowledge we have now, it’s value would easily be priceless to us.

If you are unsure about videography for your wedding day, simply watch our work and we would love to talk with you more about creating a timeless wedding film for you!

Champagne: Thank you, Ambient Sky, for sharing more about videography and your company with us! We look forward to working with you soon!

Cheers,

Mandi, Rachelle & the Champagne team

This coming September 4th, Amber and Ben will tie the knot! They’ve spent a little over a year planning for their much awaited big day and Mosca Photo- their amazing photographers- have been capturing their love through out the planning process through 4 fabulous engagement sessions!

Session 1: Camping

Session 2: Vineyard and corn

Session 3: Beach

Which brings us to their last shoot before the big day…. Downtown

Aren’t they adorable? Check out the rest of the shoot on Mosca Photo’s blog!

Thank you, Mosca Photo for sharing these images with us!! We can’t wait to work with you to create the perfect wedding day for Amber and Ben!

Wedding details:
Ceremony: Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden
Reception: Gracie’s @ Hotel DeLuxe
Photographer: Mosca Photo
Flowers: Blum Design in Flowers
Cake: Judy Reese Dreamcakes
Officiant: Reverend Lisa Kristen-Scott

Amber and Ben- We are so excited to be a part of your big day!!

Cheers,

Mandi, Rachelle & the Champagne team

Last Thursday we attended an event at West Coast Event Production‘s new venue, Pure Space. It’s personally one of my favorite new venues and one of my top 3 choices for my wedding. It’s an urban blank slate space with two walls filled with wall to wall windows. The event that we attended was Oregon Bride Magazine‘s annual Best of Bride Party. At the party they had delicious appetizers by some of Portland’s best caterers, wine from some of the Oregon’s finest wineries and a gorgeous fashion show! On top of being a great event for vendors to reconnect and mingle with brides, they also announced Oregon Bride Magazines Best of 2010 winners. We are so honored to have won Oregon Bride‘s Best New Wedding Vendor award. 

Without the help and support of our families, friends, vendors and clients we would not be where we are today! Thank you all for making this first year as Champagne Wedding & Event Coordination a huge success! With 6 years of experience and an ongoing love and passion for what we do, we couldn’t be happier to be helping you have a stress free wedding day!

Make sure to pick up your copy of Oregon Bride Magazine!

Cheers,

Mandi, Rachelle & the Champagne team