Fabulous flowers

One of the more fun things that my Mum asked for for her scrapbook was a set of close-up pictures of my wedding bouquet and I realised that I hadn’t really blogged about my wedding flowers till now.

My bouquet, my bridesmaid’s bouquet and the groom and best man’s buttonholes were custom ordered from the wonderful Princess Lasertron. I just told her, rather vaguely, what colours I wanted and what my budget was and she came up with the perfect arrangements.

A picture of all the flowers in action:

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The buttonholes couldn’t have matched Helen and Steven’s outfits any more closely, which considering they were made thousands of miles away without ever seeing the outfits still amazes me. The browns and creams in Nicki’s bouquet were really elegant and I just absolutely adore the pinks in mine!

The best thing about these flowers, for me, is that I get to keep them forever without them withering or dying.

Here are some of the close-ups of my bouquet that I took for my Mum’s scrapbook:

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including my new favourite picture of my wedding shawl:

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A close-up of Steven’s buttonhole:

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I don’t have any close-ups of Nicki’s bouquet, unfortunately, since it’s at my Mum’s house but hopefully she’ll send me the ones that my Dad took for the scrapbook.

The Shawl

Myrtle leaf shawl with willow border

Now that the wedding is past, I thought I should post some pictures of my shawl. I decided near the beginning of the year that I wanted to knit a shawl for my wedding and after some looking around, I decided on the Myrtle Leaf Shawl with Willow Border from Victorian Lace Today.

I cast on for the shawl at the beginning of June and it was completely finished with ends sewn in and blocked sometime in October.

This was an ambitious project for my second lace project but absolutely worth all the stress and difficulty in the end since it is far and away the most beautiful thing that I have ever knitted (or probably will again).

I’m still having trouble taking good photographs of it. The picture at the start of the post was taken in the cottage that we spent our honeymoon in and the one at the end shows me wearing it on the day.

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Contrary to popular suggestion at the wedding, the shawl is not destined to become a family heirloom and live in a box to be used as a christening shawl. I love it far too much not to wear it as often as I possibly can!

The Wedding

This post is going to be mainly pictures with very few words since my brain is still a little overwhelmed with all the wonderful memories.

Firstly, we had absolutely beautiful weather. There were a couple of rain showers but considering that we were in Scotland in November, it was really dry and mild.

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I was awake very early so sat and knitted while I watched the sun come up. You can’t really see it in this picture but I’m working on one of my Leyburn socks, of which I now have one and a half.

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Then came the preparation: hair, makeup, little bit of champagne.

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The ceremony went well and I managed not to cry. Since I’ve cried all the way through every other wedding I’ve been to, this was quite an achievement!

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Nicki and Helen both looked gorgeous and we both really appreciated their help and support both before, during and after the day.

After the ceremony, we went outside for drinks and photographs and for Steven and I to be pelted with confetti.

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The Myrtle leaf shawl matched my dress perfectly, especially considering that I bought the yarn online without having seen it in person and not having seen my dress for three months either.

Then we went inside where there were tables with origami centrepieces:

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and cupcakes with origami flowers on the top cake:

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Steven and I danced

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and since we had forgotten to tell the band that we didn’t want the rest of the wedding party to join us for the first dance, the best man and bridesmaid were invited up to join us:

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Fortunately, Nicki and Helen were excellent sports and, from what I could see, spent most of the dance in fits of laughter.

Then there was some more dancing,

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followed by even more dancing

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and then everyone went home.

Beautiful beads

Not content with the huge amount of knitting that has been going on, I’ve been having fun with other crafts as well.

There has been more origami to finish off the centrepieces for the wedding:

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And thanks to the wonderful coincidence of a pet shop next to the craft shop, we found the perfect stones for the bottoms of the vases: aquarium gravel!

Also for the wedding, I’ve been working on some beaded jewellery.

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The necklace in the above picture is a vintage piece (circa 1920s) that I fell in love with when looking for something to wear with my wedding dress. The earrings are my own work (circa October 2008) since it became clear that it was going to be nigh on impossible to find vintage earrings to match the necklace. (Turns out that the lady who sold me the necklace wasn’t kidding when she said it was an unusual colour for that period.) Since I have absolutely no experience of beading or jewellery-making whatsoever, I’m really pleased with how well these have turned out.

In fact, I was so pleased with how well the earrings worked that I decided to stop trying to find similar jewellery for my bridesmaid (also an impossible task) and make some instead. (Apologies for the slightly blurry photo.)

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I’m going to change the earrings to make them smaller and more like mine and I may add more crystals to the necklace but I’m happy with how these are looking so far. I bought very fine chain for the necklace because I thought it would look better and without really thinking about how I was going to work with it. Fortunately, I also bought some smaller pliers at the same time so that I didn’t have to keep using the pair from my toolbox!

While I had my beads and beading stuff out, I decided to treat myself to some new stitch markers at the same time:

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I used a really simple idea for these. They are simply a standard head pin threaded through two beads, one tiny, one large and then the end looped back down into the large bead. (The tiny bead is just to stop the head pin sliding straight through the large bead.)

Since I started using these (they show up really nicely against the black of my Sahara jumper) I keep getting asked about them at knit nights. No one seems to believe that they are as easy to make as I say so if I can find a spare 5 minutes during daylight hours, I’ll take some extra pictures and put up a how-to post.

The beads are some left over from the Venezia napkin rings that I made last year (gratuitous picture follows).

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Whirlwind weekends

I’m sure the weekends used to be longer than they are now. With my exams over, wedding planning is in full swing so weekends are even busier than work-days.

This weekend was spent like this:

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These are our gorgeous wedding invitations, as designed by Steven’s sister. Between finding a pen that worked and persuading our inkjet printer to put the addresses in the right place on the envelopes, it took a while but they were all posted this morning.

Now that they’re posted, I can link to our wedding website. I can’t take credit for the design, which I butchered from our invitation design but it was fun doing some proper coding again.

More knitting news to come!

The end is here!

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The shawl is finally finished! Well, the knitting anyway. I still need to weave in the ends and block it.

Unfortunately, thanks to the exams being only 3 days away now, I don’t have time to take better pictures or do anything else with it. I’m really, really pleased with how well it has worked though so expect lots more details next week.

The end is nigh!

The end of the work on my wedding shawl that is. I’m now more than half-finished with the border so there really isn’t much left to do. Here it is, not-terribly-artistically draped across the sofa:

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and a close-up of one of the corners with the border attached:

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Not bad for two months’ knitting. I can’t wait it to see it with the pattern properly blocked!

Cake!

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Shopping for cake is supposed to be one of the best bits of planning a wedding and yesterday it absolutely lived up to the hype. Steven and I visited a cake shop to try some samples and chat about what we wanted (cupcakes!) and ended up placing our order and putting down a deposit, which means there is one more thing ticked off on the to-do list.

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Then we came home and tried the samples they had given us. (The slices of cake were samples of their different sponges for the top tier cake that we’re going to have.) This was all really good cake and I’m just a little disappointed that I have to wait until November to have any more!

And, to make it even better, since Steven found out on Friday that he passed his final accountancy exam, we decided to open some champagne to celebrate.

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You may be thinking that what is in those glasses doesn’t look a lot like champagne and you would be right. Those are glasses of Pimms Royale (1 part Pimms to 3 parts champagne) and they too were absolutely amazing. All in all, a very good day.