Listen to the Podcast About New Creations Weddings
Podcast Summary
Katie Quinn, a seasoned planner at New Creations Weddings, recently made an insightful and heartwarming appearance on the Eventful Endeavors podcast, hosted by Hunter Dunn. Navigating the beautiful fields of the Pacific Northwest, they delve into an inspiring conversation about the magic and challenges of wedding planning.
Katie’s journey into wedding planning wasn’t a traditional one. Initially, she surprised herself by thoroughly enjoying planning her own wedding. From there, she took an online course in wedding and event planning, practicing her newfound skills on friends and family to perfect her craft. Katie’s big break came when she met Rebecca Grant, the owner of New Creations Weddings. Katie soon found herself in a learning environment under an experienced planner. The once hobby has since transformed into a full-fledged career for Katie.
As part of the compact and efficient team at New Creations Weddings, comprised mainly of Katie and Rebecca, they occasionally enlist the help of assistants when needed. They especially ensure to have additional hands for grand weddings exceeding 200 people, and multi-day cultural weddings. Their goal is to execute each event flawlessly, ensuring the guests move seamlessly from cocktail hour to reception, and that every element of the day runs smoothly.
Katie especially cherishes the weddings with emotional, heartwarming stories, fondly recounting her experience working on a wedding for Wish Upon a Wedding. This organization grants dream weddings, free of charge, to couples navigating terminal illnesses.
In the dynamic world of wedding planning, Katie Quinn and New Creations Weddings show how exceptional planning skills, passion, and dedication can turn any wedding vision into a truly memorable event.
Learn more about
New Creations Weddings
This interview was provided by
Felix and Fingers Dueling Pianos
Podcast Transcript
Felix And Fingers (00:25)
Hello all, welcome back to Eventful Endeavors. I’m Hunter and we’ve got another episode coming to you from the Pacific Northwest today. It is a beautiful PNW spring day out here. Can’t come soon enough, we’re all saying. And I am very happy to be joined today by Katie Quinn, Planner with New Creations Weddings. Katie, welcome, thank you for taking the time.
Katie Quinn (00:46)
Hello,
thank you so much for having me.
Felix And Fingers (00:49)
So, as always to start, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found your way to the field of wedding planning?
Katie Quinn (00:57)
Well, it definitely was an unexpected way into the field. Definitely not the path I originally had planned for myself. But through planning my own wedding, I discovered how much fun it was. I really had a knack for it and decided to kind of look into if this was a possibility to be a career or not for me. At the time, we just had one child, my husband worked full time, and we’re, you know, trying to figure out what do I do?
So I took a online course in wedding planning and event planning. then I just found friends and family who were engaged, used them as guinea pigs to test all my new skills on and did that as a hobby for a while. Things really picked up when I met new Creations owner, Rebecca Grant, joined her team and I’ve been with them ever since.
just kind of really learning firsthand from an experienced planner. And now I do full-fledged weddings. So it’s kind of cool how something that was just a trial, a little hobby turned into a full-on career.
Felix And Fingers (02:02)
Awesome. I mean, that’s how I feel about my, my path with music frequently. A question that I didn’t realize I had actually until just now. with new creations are, is it mostly just you and Rebecca as far as planning staff?
Katie Quinn (02:14)
It is, yes. We do have a couple people who come on as assistants as needed, but it’s just really just the two of us.
Felix And Fingers (02:21)
Okay, yeah, it just made me curious because with I was thinking again of my own field, right? There’s you might have a band with the same full-time membership all the time, or you might have I’ve done a lot of work as a hired gun is kind of the term right where typically it’s a solo artist and
they might be playing a lot of solo shows, but sometimes they play a duo show and they need typically either like a keyboard player or a lead guitarist or a violinist. And sometimes they’re playing full band shows. Right. And then, so that was my work for a couple of years there, right? Was I would, I wasn’t necessarily a full-time member. I didn’t expect to be on every show, but I knew usually a couple times a month I might get the call like, Hey, you available on this date? I’m just, just curious if it.
ever worked the same. Because I would imagine, right, for some larger scale weddings, right, like having as many hands on deck as you can.
Katie Quinn (03:15)
Yeah, we do have to sometimes take on multiple assistants for bigger weddings. Particularly cultural weddings for multiple days, we like to take people on. Anyone more than, or any wedding that has more than 200 guests, we always try to have an additional set of hands. Moving people from cocktail hour to reception is, you know, a very long process. As many hands that can get people moving, the better.
Felix And Fingers (03:38)
Yeah. Do you have any, I guess, like favorite stories from or even just like the story of an entire wedding that you’ve done thus far?
Katie Quinn (03:49)
I’d have to narrow that down. I’ve had some pretty incredible moments. ⁓
Felix And Fingers (03:55)
Stay most
memorable for whatever reason.
Katie Quinn (03:57)
I guess I’d love to kind of mention the one I recently did back in November. It was a wedding through Wish Upon a Wedding. They’re an organization who grants free of charge weddings to couples who are suffering from a terminal illness or other kind of situation where, you know, unfortunately they can’t plan their own wedding and they can’t afford it. Everyone who…
was a part of that wedding, donated their services 100 % free. We had an entire, every single slot vendor that you can think of was a part of it. had photographer, videographer, DJ, everything, donating their services to this amazing couple who the bride was terminal with stage four brain cancer. She was very, very young too. And so,
Felix And Fingers (04:32)
Yeah.
Katie Quinn (04:48)
That in itself was just such a profound experience to really bring me back down to kind of why I became a wedding planner to begin with. Throughout my career as a wedding planner, kind of get desensitized to the emotional aspects of it. Like, you don’t really get to see the ceremony because you’re thinking about the next step. And all of those aww kind of moments, you don’t really get to a
Felix And Fingers (05:14)
Yeah.
Katie Quinn (05:14)
get to experience anymore. So it really was a great way for me to be like, this is why I’m doing this. you know, to see these two people be able to get married, it was their dream wedding. I got to plan it from start to finish, full planning in only two months. That was a sprint and stressful, but so rewarding. I…
I think if anyone has the opportunity to be a part of something like that, jump on it. know you think about, well, I’m donating so much money to this cause, but it’s so, so worth it.
Felix And Fingers (05:49)
Yeah,
more than worth it. Yeah, right. mean, one of those, I just, you know, just imagine myself, I see, I think why you would have that feeling, you know, being in the field. And is this in the same way, actually, I, when I started doing music for for a living, I tried to
hold myself to doing at least a few shows a year for free because as it as it you know as it sort of went from
Well, you being in school to being a working adult and from being part-time to basically my full-time and having, you know, of course I found myself having to do more and more of the math of, know, well, what’s the time commitment versus the pay and does the math shake out?
Katie Quinn (06:35)
Mm-hmm.
Felix And Fingers (06:39)
which is like what you gotta do to make a living, but I tried to take at least a few shows a year just for the fun of it to remind myself like, no, at the end of the day, that’s not why I do this. There is deeper meaning here. And as a wedding coordinator, to help people bring together their, this is one of the handful of dates, right, that is going to define your life. Yeah, I can see that for sure. ⁓
Katie Quinn (07:01)
Yeah, and in this industry,
we don’t get very many opportunities to give back. And so I didn’t realize this was even a thing. And now that I know, I just want to tell everybody.
Felix And Fingers (07:12)
Yeah, newbie question here. So you said two months was a sprint. What’s a more typical timeline look like?
Katie Quinn (07:14)
Thank
It takes about a year to 18 months to plan a full wedding from start to finish. That’s typically what we like. I’ve planned weddings within that time frame. My own wedding I planned in four months. Even though we were engaged for three years, we decided just to not take our time with that. But typically for a full planning it’s a full year. So they…
reached out to me and they’re like, hey, we have this wedding happening in November. They like to do it in the off season. So then it’s a little bit more of an incentive for people to join onto the projects. You’re not giving up like a peak August, Saturday or anything like that. But, you know, it’s definitely, you know, you have to find every vendor. You have to find the venue, everything that takes time. And so it really was just a daily grind getting everything done in time.
Felix And Fingers (07:54)
Yeah.
Gotcha. And I think that dovetails nicely into something else I wanted to ask you. So another question from someone who is unmarried and not a wedding planner myself. And I think I can kind of just guess from the name and from context. But can you talk a little bit about just the difference between
day of coordination and being a full planner, partial, like is it pretty much what you’d guess from the names or is there a little more to it? are those typically clearly defined roles for any given wedding or does it sometimes like blend one into the other a little bit?
Katie Quinn (08:46)
Yeah, that’s, most planners kind of agree, full, you’re planning the whole wedding. Partial, you’re taking on bits and pieces while the couple takes on bits and pieces and you combined efforts to create your wedding day. Day of coordination really is, it’s not just coming in on the day, swooping in and running it.
With new creations, we like to call it final planning because it’s those final four months before a wedding that you kind of take over, you make your timeline, you make your layout, and then day of coronation isn’t really included in every kind of wedding package you can think of. That’s just like the actual day.
Felix And Fingers (09:25)
Yeah.
Katie Quinn (09:26)
So there’s a little bit of crossover. know each company kind of has their own idea of what they view as partial planning. We like to have it be design focused. So we handle anything visual, you know, your rental items, specialty napkins, linens, florist, cake designer, all those little things. And then the couple takes care of more of the logistical items, such as your DJ, photographer, videographer.
But there are other companies who take a different approach and they do partial as more of, know, they’ll handle like the initial contact of vendors and then the couple kind of takes over from there. But FULL and DIAF coordination are kind of those that are pretty streamlined in the industry.
Felix And Fingers (10:09)
Gotcha.
Cool. And that leads into, I guess I just have a lot of sort of newbie questions today. These are genuinely interesting to me. ⁓ So I was thinking a little bit actually, some, my girlfriend and I were talking about, so as ⁓ I think mentioned to you on the email, I was just down in Utah. were.
Katie Quinn (10:15)
That’s great, yeah, bring it on.
Felix And Fingers (10:26)
doing some backpacking and she’s still out hiking the entirety of the Heyduk Trail for the second time 800 miles Utah into Arizona. She’s a badass, I don’t know what she’s doing with me. yeah, yeah, yeah, it really is. And we, yeah, but we were just, you know, in going over the logistics ⁓ for that, we were…
Katie Quinn (10:36)
That’s amazing.
Felix And Fingers (10:49)
talking, you planning for long distance backpacking trips a little bit, which we’ve both done a fair bit of her even more so. And as you said, right, with that year to 18 months typical timeline for planning a wedding, it kind of jogged my mind of that’s that’s a pretty typical timeline, I think for planning.
a through hike to multiple hundreds or thousands of miles. And when we were talking about it, we were kind of touching on how we’ve each approached the ones that we’ve done. what we found was kind of what we suspected, which is that probably I’m a little more so the…
Katie Quinn (11:10)
Mm-hmm.
Felix And Fingers (11:26)
plan boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, like make my itinerary, try to stick to it, understanding that not everything is going to be entirely predictable and you will probably break the itinerary at some point. but to then, you know, have a plan A plan B plan C and that’s kind of how she’s approaching, this one, desert hiking. You have to do that a little more because water is such a factor.
Katie Quinn (11:41)
Mm-hmm.
Felix And Fingers (11:48)
You know and in Alpine right like up here you can be a little bit looser with it but that it made me think and be curious as far as Especially I think the day of or final coordination right obviously a wedding is Not the same exactly the same as a backpacking trip But as far as I mean there’s even more moving pieces
And to finally get to a question here, I guess it was, are there any aspects that you found are maybe less predictable than one might think, right? Are there any parts of a typical, all the moving pieces you have at a wedding that…
That like there’s just seems to be some element of we can’t entirely predict what’s gonna happen here and if so Day of then do you do you lean more towards do you like? Plan a if that if for whatever reason we have to abandon plan a plan B plan C Or not
I’m figuring it out at the moment. I should have planned out how I phrase this a little better, but hopefully that makes sense. Yeah.
Katie Quinn (12:55)
I think I understand what you’re asking. Like how
do I, like how to approach those situations where you can’t really predict it. Yeah.
Felix And Fingers (13:02)
Right. I
mean, if it was completely clockwork, then nobody would even need to be there day of, right? But of course it’s not. So yeah.
Katie Quinn (13:07)
pretty much.
There’s, so yes and no. The parts of the wedding day that are unpredictable are also predictable. You expect ceremonies sometimes to run a little longer. You expect moving people from point A to B to take more time. Probably the biggest wild card is the toasts, honestly. You never know how long Father of the Bride’s gonna talk. ⁓
Felix And Fingers (13:31)
Mmm. Yeah.
Katie Quinn (13:33)
We’ve
had situations where, gosh, this was years ago, the father of the bride talked for half an hour. And we’re like, my gosh, everyone was enjoying it, but what do you do? You’re behind in your timeline. Nobody knows what’s going on. He’s just talking and talking and talking. But that’s kind of one of those skills you learn as a planner is you have to adapt. You have to pivot.
⁓ Make those calls of like, okay, well, we’re behind here. What can we do to speed up to get to the portion of the evening that the couple’s really important or that the couple views as important? You have to have the plan A, plan B mentality to succeed in wedding coordination. Now, you also have to think on your feet without a plan because, you know, especially if you’re dealing with like those specialty weddings that are on an island that involve a fairy.
Felix And Fingers (14:01)
Thanks.
Katie Quinn (14:21)
That again is another piece that is so, yeah, it’s predictably unpredictable. You know that things are gonna happen, but you don’t know what. So just navigating kind of like what to do in that moment, making the call, but you have to do it with such a professional grace. You can’t panic. You have to have the, it’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna be a little bit late on this and that’s okay.
Felix And Fingers (14:22)
yeah, fun parts of life in Western Washington.
Katie Quinn (14:46)
Having a plan before you approach any vendor or talking with it, talking through the situation. I love to talk to the DJ when it comes to these types of situations because we’re kind of the two that really run the programming of the day. ⁓ I actually had a situation a couple months ago. It was a Cambodian wedding and those typically run about three hour ceremonies with little intermissions in between. And we got
Felix And Fingers (14:59)
Yeah.
Katie Quinn (15:11)
the call that the monks were running late because they ran out of gas on the highway and they were not expected to be there probably you know an hour late or so and here’s the ceremony happening and I’m you know like okay what do we do we have to rearrange this rearrange that so finally when intermission came you know I approached the couple I’m like okay we’re just gonna switch this and this it’s gonna be fine
You know, you can’t be like, my gosh, the monks are late. Everyone’s gonna have to be delayed by an hour. You know, you have to have those quick thinking plan B moments to execute a wedding.
Felix And Fingers (15:47)
And very similar to as we had also touched on a little bit, we are both former theater kids here. And actually, I guess I just first asked, do you have any favorite roles that you played at any point that just really stand out?
Katie Quinn (16:00)
I think the funnest was actually in high school. I think I was a junior in high school. I can’t remember. Sophomore or junior. And we did fairy tales in like a, not anything like Into the Woods. Most people assume it’s Into the Woods. No, we did snippets of fairy tales in like this longer.
play productions. like we had like the three little pigs, Rapunzel, Snow White, and we actually went to different elementary schools and performed for them. It was so much fun. It wasn’t anything like, you know, like Wicked or ⁓ Mary Poppins or anything, but it was really, really fun just to be pig number three and just run with it.
Felix And Fingers (16:33)
⁓ nice.
It’s, It reminds me of, ⁓
our swing choir, like the sort of the small jazz swing choir at my high school was called the Showstoppers. And they had the distinctive, distinctive look. think it may have changed a bit in the years since I graduated, because I’m an old man now. But for a long time, I remember it was like the sparkly red sparkly dresses and the red suspenders. And I swear to God, I’m still finding like glitter from the dresses, you know, from when I had a minivan.
Katie Quinn (16:53)
Thank
you
You
Felix And Fingers (17:12)
you know, like just the classic mid-2000s Toyota, Zagra, my man, that, and I was frequently shuttle for a lot of us.
And I think there’s still glitter under the seats. It never leaves. But ⁓ once a year we had the Showstopper Tour Day. called it. guess the choir director had enough pull that she could plan it out and kind of pull us all out of school for the day. And we went around to all the elementary and middle schools and also like sometimes like a couple of the retirement homes or maybe a church and did our, you know, sort of 20 minute show like 10 times in one day.
Katie Quinn (17:34)
wow.
Felix And Fingers (17:47)
and was great recruitment a lot, right? And she frequently, know, any, you know, some current stops would share their memory of, yeah, I remember seeing this when I was in elementary school and made me really want to do it. So she set up a very effective pipeline. But I think it ⁓ was a good introduction, you know, even as a teenager to, okay, yeah, like this, you know, the show must go on, right? You’re gonna be a working performer, professional, right? Just like.
Katie Quinn (17:48)
Yeah.
Felix And Fingers (18:12)
Gotta show up, do the thing, roll with the punches, right? Because it doesn’t always go smoothly when you’re trying to do 10 shows in a day. so with…
Katie Quinn (18:13)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
I love.
Felix And Fingers (18:23)
Of course, being a performer, being stage manager on theatrical production, just being on top of everything, do you feel like that, there’s definitely similarities, do you feel like that has informed the way that you approach wedding coordination? Do you sort of look in back, see any lines that you might draw from one to the other?
Katie Quinn (18:42)
I mean, I think maybe the first thing that really comes to mind is improv. You know, when someone forgets their lines and you’re trying to help remind them without reminding them. It’s very similar to kind of, you know, what I just touched on where you have to, you know, think on your feet a lot as a wedding coordinator.
Felix And Fingers (18:51)
Mm-hmm.
Katie Quinn (19:04)
⁓ Also acting in general you have to act like everything’s When sometimes it’s And then I guess just I feel like theater people have a specific personality that I don’t know how you are, but I’m very you know, I’m very ⁓ outgoing and
Felix And Fingers (19:05)
Thank
Katie Quinn (19:24)
upbeat and I tend to think on the positive side of things and I feel like a lot of friends I know who are into theater as well have those similar traits where you know they they can go and approach someone and be like hey can you please make your way to reception it’s time for dinner versus someone who is more you know shy and reserved and doesn’t like to talk to people that want to work for them
So don’t know if that’s so much theater training, but I feel like people who go into kind of the musical theater or just plays in general have that little spark inside them where they are bubbly and people pleasers and they love to be around others. And I’m definitely one of those.
Felix And Fingers (20:03)
Gotcha. was probably a little bit more on the curmudgeonly side as far as the theater folks, but it’s fine, right? Somebody has to play all the cranky old man roles. That was my typecast in high school. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I was Ado Annie’s dad in Oklahoma, right? So got to be suspicious and threatened Curly a bunch, or no, not Curly, Will. ⁓
Katie Quinn (20:05)
You
Exactly. You were Ebenezer Scrooge, huh?
No.
will ya?
Felix And Fingers (20:29)
no, it’s Ali Hakim, think. I can’t remember, was like 10 years ago. And it was Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. I did get to break the type. ⁓ Probably my favorite in high school was ⁓ Algernon in Importance of Being Earnest.
Katie Quinn (20:38)
Mmm.
I have actually never seen that play.
Felix And Fingers (20:51)
It’s fun. It’s very goofy. And we definitely hammed it up for all it was worth. ⁓ My co-worker, yeah, my co-star, pranked me pretty well on opening night. Trying to think if there’s a…
Katie Quinn (20:59)
Hehehehe
Felix And Fingers (21:11)
Yeah, the way she did it was a little not safe for work. So I don’t know if I can share it on the podcast, but like I was this close to just completely losing character in front of the whole audience. Yeah, she was well played. One times. Cool. And I think some I always like to…
Katie Quinn (21:18)
I’m
Felix And Fingers (21:32)
ask at some point, is there any advice you would give to a first time wedding planner? Could be someone else, could be yourself, however many, six, eight years ago?
Katie Quinn (21:43)
I definitely would recommend spending a year assisting and shadowing well-established planners in your area. It’s really tempting to dive right in and had I known that back in 2014 when I started my journey as a budding planner, I wasted a lot of time just kind of trying to do it on my own.
Having now I know kind of what I would have done differently and the very first year I was with Rebecca’s team. That’s what I did I assisted the entire year and I learned from her and at the time we had another Senior planner Mandy and I just absorbed every little bit of knowledge they could pass my way And you get that that real-world experience It’s just it was really
I was very appreciative that I had that full year to do things before I started taking on day of coordination and partial planning and full planning and all that stuff. It’s really, it’s hard because you just want to jump right in and you’re like, hey, I know how to do this. Let’s plan a full wedding. But really pause. Take a year.
Go to different planners, because they’ll also learn about kind of how you want to run your own company. You’ll learn about the type of planner you want to be, because everyone’s different. I’ve assisted other planners besides New Creations team, and I always learn something new when I’m…
helping out and even still now you know they can reach out to me like Katie I have absolutely no one to assist me at this wedding I’ve reached out to everyone else you want to join me for this one like absolutely sure and you know even though I’ve been doing it for a long time you know it’s always great to see kind of hey how do you how do you run your weddings maybe I can learn something or I can help you in something that maybe you want to learn about how to run weddings so definitely spend a year just
learning. Hold off on jumping right in.
Felix And Fingers (23:37)
Makes a lot of sense, a lot of sense. two groups I played with for a long time. I guess this might be a little more on the how much is pre-planned versus how much do you adapt in the moment side, ⁓ but in just sort of learning.
Katie Quinn (23:38)
Yes.
Felix And Fingers (23:53)
different styles and what you find works well for you. One of the artists who I played a lot with as a hired gun was very spontaneous, very like would just sort of call songs in the moment, you know, call one and I’d be like, sometimes, you know, maybe it was on it was
not on the list that I had, but I’d played it previously and I was okay sometimes. I was like, I have never heard this song in my life. And was just like, it’s fine. Like one, you know, one, four, two, five, just watch me. You’ll be good. And we were just go for it. Yeah. But that was a good way to learn like, oh, okay. You know, like, yeah, this is part of being a pro. Like I might make some mistakes, but if I’m, if I’m watching.
Katie Quinn (24:21)
No.
Mm-hmm.
Felix And Fingers (24:33)
⁓ yeah, I’m watching the fellow players. Well, right. Usually the lead guitar player is standing over there, like he’d strum and then just like kind of flash me a four chord or whatever it’d be. And then I’d be like, gotcha. Thank you. and another group that I’ve been playing with for, about we’ve had the same core five people for about four years now. and you know, we, play from, we play from sheet music. We plan the set out, give it a whole arc to it. Often there’s a theme right now. We’re,
We’re doing a run with a set. We have like two thirds of the James Bond theme songs and so like we dress up a little bit. We got some we got like a cardboard cut out of Sean Connery and Craig and I think Rosnin. Yeah and very much the other end of the spectrum like we plan it out. We play it the same way every time and present the show and I enjoy both. I think I think
Katie Quinn (25:06)
family.
What?
Felix And Fingers (25:23)
In the moment, I most of the time lean maybe a little more towards the planned side, but it’s also nice to shake it up sometimes and just have a like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. And the audience is into it. Yeah, yeah, a little bit. Okay, I think.
Katie Quinn (25:33)
And in the moment gym session.
Felix And Fingers (25:39)
That was everything I had and we’re, yeah, we’re right about at our typical time. Any last things you can think of that you’d like to share with the listener or with the new, the appreciative wedding planning newbie you have sitting right here?
Katie Quinn (25:52)
No, I think we definitely touched on a lot of really great subjects. asked some really good questions and you know, I’d love to come back, you know, again and share my wisdom that I have.
Felix And Fingers (26:02)
Absolutely.
