Pearl River
June 09, 2009
In what I think is the final wedding post, and moving nicely back to the main theme of knitting, here is my River!
I had wanted to knit something for the wedding all along, but suddenly it struck me 4 weeks before the wedding that I hadn't done it yet! I was working away in a hotel, and knitted all evening for 2 weeks, and got the bulk of the project done. It was finally finished the week before the wedding. I'm really glad I did it, thinking back it would have been awful as a knitter not to have knitted something!
The pattern I chose it River by Sharon Miller, made in a shade of Kidsilk Haze called pearl. It took less than 2 balls! And consequently was as light as a feather.
Here are some shots of it blocking - not too easy to see because the carpet is a very similar colour!
And here are some photos of it in action on the day:
Oh I was so excited in those photos! I like thinking about the wedding when I'm feeling blue, it never fails to cheer me up!
I will be back soon with more knitting (well, some knitting and lots of stashing).
Posted by jen at 08:49 PM | Comments (7)
Stationery!
May 29, 2009
Stationery today - the first part is an entry I had to remove before the wedding as firstly something happened as a result of me posting it which was dreadful, and secondly Adam pointed out that lots of people coming to the wedding read this website and it would ruin the surprise to see too much before the big day. I agreed so I took it down and saved it for posting again now. And then afterwards I'll put some professional photos of the things we made in action!
The original post:
A bit of wedding stationery crafting today - we have been doing a lot of cutting and sticking and printing etc recently. Adam is only allowed to do certain risk free tasks, as he absolutely hates cutting things out and his writing looks like a load of squashed insects, but it has still been very much a joint effort, which has made it much more fun.
We made our invitations a few months ago (see here), and we have had replies for all of those (apart from one rude person!), and we have been using the same card and rose motif for making all the other stationery.
The first thing we made was the name cards, to put where people are sitting for dinner. These were really easy - we just guillotined A4 card into 12 pieces, folded them in half, and then I wrote the names on with silver pen. I really like how the silver pen came out - it stands out a lot better than we thought it might. The purple cards are for people having roasted butternut squash soup as a starter, and the grey cards are for those having sundried tomato and cashew nut terrine with cherry tomato sauce. Here are mine and Adam's cards! Mine looks really odd to me, it will take a long time to get used to my new name!
The next thing we made was the table plan - actually this was pretty much my work while Adam put together the playlist. We decided who would sit where together and then I made the plan. You can't see it very well, as it's so big in real life and shown so small here. We put everyone's name (alphabetical by first name - because otherwise there would be tons of Thurstons and Devines all stuck together) at the top with the table number they are sitting at, and then put the tables below with the exact layout. Then I used the roses from the invitations to put the same number of roses next to the table as the number of the table.
We are getting it printed professionally on A2 paper, in fact I think it arrived earlier this week and we just need to pick it up from the postal depot. I can't wait to see it, I certainly love how it came out electronically! I bet none of the guests even notice! But it's been fun anyway and very satisfying.
After that we put together the table numbers. That was very quick - just made a picture with the number in a fancy font and then arranged the correct number of roses around it (I just lifted the roses from the table plan and distributed them about the number). We printed 2 copies, and stuck one on each side of A5 purple card. Here they are:
I didn't write about this before, but the other very cool thing we made was photoboards. We tried to have photos of everyone who was coming to the wedding (old and embarrassing ones if possible as well!), and apart from a few guests other halves, I think we managed it! We took 3 50x50cm clipframes, and made a big collection of photos of us, friends and family, and put them in with a silver tissue paper backing to make it a bit prettier. Now they are up in our kitchen and I LOVE THEM! All my favourite important people on the wall!
The last thing we did was make orders of the day - using the same really nice shiny champagne paper that was used for information sheets in our invitations. We just did 2 to a sheet of A4 paper and guillotined them in half:
And now here are some professional photos of everything in action:
I hope you enjoyed the paper crafts, again as usual there were a few stresses that went with them, but they were a lot less intense than other things we made for the wedding, as they didn't have to be so last minute. I loved making them (Adam possibly less so due to his craft aversion!), but we were both really chuffed with them - it was all worth it when it all got laid out the afternoon before and we could see it all coming together!
Posted by jen at 01:54 PM | Comments (7)
Flowers!
May 28, 2009
Right, onto the flowers. We decided to do the flowers ourselves really early on, because my bridemaid Jess got married before us, and she did them herself and they looked great. Also it is all about priorities, and spending mega bucks on flowers really didn't sit well with us!
We (and Jess) got our flowers from flowers 4 florists. I would recommend them to anyone - they offer a fantastic service. They have a minimum order, so we ended up having to get a few more flowers than we needed. But we only spent £175 in total so it really wasn't that bad! We went into a florists 2 weeks before the wedding, and asked how much for a small bouquet of roses, and were quoted £80, which almost made me wet myself with shock. I have no idea why it was that much - perhaps the W word?
We ordered Sweet Avalanche roses for my bouquet and the buttonholes:
Two kinds of gerbera (Pinky Eye and White Grizzly) for the bridemaids bouquets and the tables:
And also Biarritz and Feeling Green crysanths to add to the bridesmaids bouquets:
.
I don't know much about flowers - I thought that the crysanths would be one flower per stem, but they were in bunches, with about 5 flowers on each - so we ended up with 20 bunches of each colour rather than 20 individual flowers! Oops!
The flowers arrived in massive boxes, and it took me about 2 hours to unpack the lot, trim the stems and put them in water. They came a couple of days early so they have time to open up nicely before the wedding.
We drove them to the venue in big buckets, and made the table vases on the afternoon before. It was easy, we just trimmed the stems and put one or two in each vase.
The next morning, I had the bridesmaids assembled in plenty of time, and we jointly made the buttonholes and bouquets while everyone tried to calm me down! I would have been even more crazy if I didn't have anything to do though!
There was a lot of laughing and no one knew what they were doing - it was brilliant!
I found some very helpful videos on the internet, and then bought some floristry supplies from a cheap website.
Video instructions on how to make a buttonhole are here.
And on how to make a bridal bouquet here.
This is when I was trying to tell people what I had learned from the internet about buttonholes, and Alison is leaning in concentrating as though she is going to learn valuable information from a hysterical bride who had only picked up floristry as a hobby that morning:
The buttonholes came out fine, we made extras in case any were a bit too amateur! The bouquets were just bunches of flowers, with mine arranged as much like a ball shape as possible, tied with ribbon, and the ribbon wrapped round and pinned with pearl headed pins.
Bridesmaids bouquets:
My bouquet:
Us with our flowers:
As with everything else, it was mildly stressful but definitely I would recommend it. We could probably have saved even more money by getting supermarket flowers, but I really wanted a big bouquet of proper roses. Also making the flowers in the morning really was superb fun!
Evidence of fun:
Posted by jen at 12:50 PM | Comments (2)
The last few things! Wedding cakes!
May 27, 2009
Thanks for the comments on my dress! I am now going to attempt to finish posting about the rest of the wedding crafting, as I don't feel I can move on until I have done so (which may be silly but I liked reading about other people's wedding crafting very much, so I want to put mine up too incase it is useful to anybody). I am going to do a post everyday for the rest of the week, and cover stationery, cakes, flowers, and knitting. I was thinking of doing it all in one go, in a mega post, but that would probably be a bit too much!
So today, I am going to cover cakes.
You have seen about 1 billion photos of my cake experimenting already, as we picked the best flavours and tested them numerous times. It was fattening! But also fun.
In the end we had 3 types of cake. Raspberry and almond cake with raspberry mousse topping, dark chocolate cake with lemon filling and chocolate icing, and white chocolate and almond cake with butterscotch cream cheese icing (wheat free). I loved them all! They were served as dessert at the wedding, with ice cream on the side. My Dad made the chocolate ones (he made 48 cakes), and we made all the others (36 of each flavour) - I did the baking as I had time off work, and Adam enthusiastically helped with the icing!
Here are some photos of the delicious things filling up the kitchen:
We drove them to the venue (90 minutes away) in tupperware and I was terrified they would be damaged! But it was all ok.
Here are some professional photos of the cakes in place - you can see the chocolate ones here too. Dad says he never wants to look at another chocolate cupcake, but they were genuinely incredible.
We got the stand from ebay. Which reminds me, I probably should sell it on ebay as we're unlikely to need it again!
Some possibly helpful information for anyone thinking of making their own wedding cakes:
I am not a professional baker, so cupcakes were definitely the option for us - especially as you get to avoid thick, white icing. Cupcakes are pretty easy, and I think they look cute. Also, there are loads and loads of yummy cupcake recipes, and its easy to invent your own to get exactly what you want.
It took me most of a day to make and ice 72 cupcakes. I had 2 cupcake trays, with room for 12 cakes in each, so that was 3 baking sessions. Then I had to make mousse, let it set, pipe it on, then make caramel, get Adam to beat it into cream cheese, and pipe it on.
They were made on Thursday, iced Thursday evening, taken to the venue on Friday and scoffed on Saturday. They still tasted fresh, and when we did all the trial cupcakes, they kept ok for a week (in the fridge - I wouldn't be leaving things out that have cream in them!).
It was fun although ever so slightly stressful, because the raspberry ones didn't rise as much as they usually do, and by Thursday I had gone into mad bride panic. All in all I would DEFINITELY recommend it!
I hope you enjoyed looking at the cakes, flowers next time!
Posted by jen at 11:55 AM | Comments (5)
Wedding dress
May 08, 2009
Thank you so much to everyone who commented and left congratulations on my last post. I really wanted to email everyone individually but I left it too late and then there were too many comments! I really loved reading them all though so thanks a lot.
I have been insanely busy lately, and I have lots of new things to show, but I somehow feel like I have to finish off posting about wedding crafts first before I can address new stuff! Even though by now probably anyone who's interested already looked at my photos on flickr!
I'll try and blitz it in a few posts and see how it goes.
OK DRESS!
As you may be aware, this is the dress that I was trying to copy:
It is by Carolina Herrera. I have no idea how much it cost, but I am pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to afford it. But that's not even the point, I just really wanted to sew my own wedding dress!
I really love it because it is really pretty, but not fussy at all. And I just didn't want a train or anything like that. They are very nice but not for me.
After some initial faffing (I chose a pattern that wasn't really ideal), and 3 muslins, I finally went ahead with V7848. I had to take it in at the bust a lot, and go from smaller sizes at the top to larger ones at the bottom due to my big bum (oh I know it's not big! It's just that it's 12 inches bigger than my waist - which is quite an increase!). Also I adjusted the pattern so it went straight down from the hips, and shortened it a lot. I also took inspiration from my first dress choice, V2237, and fully lined the dress and made a lined foundation as well - I used the pattern pieces from V7848 to create foundation pieces which would be used in the same way as in V2237.
I bought these fabrics:
Silk duchesse satin for the dress, a silk satin lining, and silk organza for the flowers. It wasn't cheap but I really fell in love with the blush colour of the fabric.
In the end, after a lot of debate, I went with the "wrong" side of the fabric to show on the outside. I really loved the right side better (it was incredibly shiny), but I didn't think it was the best side for this particular dress.
So! I made the dress and attached the foundation, and then cut 2 large rectangles, sewed them into a tube, gathered the top, and attached this to the dress to make the full skirt:
I finished it off by trimming the gathered fabric and encasing it with the flat seam allowance to make it all smooth on the inside.
Next I used this website! I needed to make that little pelmet/extra skirt bit that the corsage sits on, and it is a truncated cone, so I had to find a geometry website! It actually worked pretty well!
This was the dress at this point (and badly needing an iron!):
Next I covered and attached 18 11mm cover buttons to the back of the dress - they were just for decoration as it fastened with a zip. You can see them here:
Finally I made the flowers. I bought an ebook from here, and I found it a good starting point, but I did find some of the instructions a little confusing. If you use it as a guide but also use some intuition then it's great.
I made a lot of flowers! Some were also intended for my hair:
I got all those, plus a trial, and had loads to spare from just one metre of organza.
Then I sewed 2 on the dress, 3 on a comb, and everything was finished!
It was actually a bit of a stressful process, not in itself, but because I was trying to do this amongst all the other planning and a very horrible time at work. Luckily Adam did a lot as well! But it was massively worth it, I loved my dress - it was perfect for me and it wouldn't have been if I had not made it myself. Maybe some more experienced seamstresses are looking down at my efforts and I do know my dress is not like some amazing beaded one you would buy in the shops....but I think it's easy to over inflate weddings, and get wound up in thinking everything needs to be "perfect". And I'm not saying that's wrong, I just think my version of perfect is a bit different - my version involves everything being homemade!
Here are some more pictures, I know this is a massive post but maybe it can sit here on the internet and be a handy reference for anyone else wanting to make their own dress, if only to show that it's not some horrifically hard weirdo thing to be doing!
Posted by jen at 12:45 PM | Comments (14)
We got married!!!!!
April 07, 2009
Taken on 14th March 2009. We are now back from a fantastic honeymoon, and although I am sad it is all over, we are still on a definite high from the whole experience!
I can't wait to show off all the fun wedding things that I couldn't before the big day (starting with the dress!), but for now I'll just leave you with a link to a selection of photos from our photographers website: check them out here. She did such a great job! I can't get enough of the photos, they make a crazy emotional whirlwind of a day seem real.
Posted by jen at 12:47 PM | Comments (43)
Stationery crafting!
March 05, 2009
I had an entry here today about crafting wedding stationery, but I have deleted the entire thing as it was pointed out to me guests might see the things, and the surprise on the day be ruined. I will post them again post wedding!
Posted by jen at 11:27 AM | Comments (6)
Pretty wedding jewellery
March 04, 2009
Hello again! I was going to write about my dress today, but I forgot to take some photos last night which wouldn't give the whole game away, so today is about the jewellery I made for myself and the bridesmaids instead.
I made the bridesmaids necklaces and matching bracelets a while ago, from kits that I bought at the Spellbound Bead Shop in Lichfield (near where my parents live). This is definitely one of my favourite shops in the world, as not only do they have loads and loads of amazing beads, but also they design and sell kits to make all kinds of things - necklaces, tiaras, everything you can imagine. They come with all the beads/thread/wire etc that you need and really good instructions.
I bought a kit called Neptune for the bridesmaids, in purple.
Here's the bracelet and necklace set (I made 3 in total):
And here's it worn:
It would pretty much fit anyone, as it doesn't have a clasp, just sits around the neck on a very sturdy wire (which was a total bitch to work with incidentally).
Onto my necklace! I didn't have trouble finding a kit design that I liked, but I really had trouble finding a colour combination that would go nicely with my dress. My dress is a weird colour, as it's very pale pink, but more like a vintage, peachy pink than a sugary pink. In the end I phoned up the shop, and they made me up a kit in the exact colours I wanted! They were BRILLIANT! They even offered that I could send a swatch of fabric in and they would match it, but I'd left it too late for that so I let them use their judgement, and what they picked was perfect.
I got the kit Gossamer, and here are some closeups of the necklace - I love the design, it's so lightweight and delicate:
And here's a photo of it on, where you can just see a tiny bit of my dress (so you can see it matches really well):
I am very happy with how all the jewellery making turned out - I felt like I was being a bit of a crazy lady making all that stuff when I didn't really have time, but I'm glad I did.
Posted by jen at 08:52 AM | Comments (8)
Bridesmaid's dresses completed!
March 03, 2009
It's been AGES! I have been the busiest I have ever been over the last few months. I had an insane few months at work - always staying away in a crappy hotel and working crazy hours, and desperately trying to do wedding things inbetween.
The wedding is on 14th March - which is now less than 2 weeks away! It's all under control, kind of at least, but we are both doing stuff until bedtime every night to get it all done. I had no idea there would be this much to do! And the venue are being very difficult about everything - suddenly refusing to do things they said they would, but we were too stupid and trusting to get this in writing.
Anyway! Time to show some crafts - starting today with a dresses update. I finished both bridesmaid dresses by mid January, and was really pleased with how they turned out. The pattern (Vogue 7848) is pretty good, although for some reason it is always loose around the bust, and I had to take both dresses in. I read on sewing pattern reviews that everyone had the same trouble but it was still annoying!
Here is me wearing one of the dresses - before it was hemmed. It was about knee length on the bridesmaid when it was finished (she is taller than me):
Here's a photo with flash in case that's easier to see:
Although looking at it, the flash makes the dress look crazily shiny, which it isn't really.
I really love how it came out (although it's probably easier to see the colours in daylight). I will post some professional photos after the event.
I obviously can't show much of my dress! And also thinking about it, it probably deserves its own post. Back with that tomorrow.
Posted by jen at 09:22 AM | Comments (3)
A frustrating update! But maybe there is hope?
December 11, 2008
Thanks so much to everyone who gave advice and opinions on my last post. They were all much appreciated! I am still very undecided on the sheeny vs shiny dilemma, but luckily (?) I am also still undecided on the muslin, so there is plently of time to keep mulling it over!
I of course followed the unanimous advice to make another muslin, and have been tweeking away, but am definitely not happy with it. I bought a vile shade of polyester satin that was on sale, because as advised by Sil, it will be more like the real thing than a flimsy cotton. It was only £4.50 per metre and well worth it. You can't really tell in the photos below, but it's a kind of pale peachy gold, and looks worse in real life!
I am now happy with how the dress looks from the front:
It fits fine around all the key places, and I can sit in it.
But! I don't like how it looks from the side at all!
It's like it poofs out, both at the front and back, from under the waist. It makes me look like I am sporting a pot belly that I don't even have, and it balloons too much over my bum!
I think the back of it is ok really - the last photo here isn't really that bad, but I'm not happy about the pot belly. My waist is probably my best feature!
Maybe the pattern I'm using (Vogue 2237) is designed for more drapey fabrics, where this wouldn't be an issue?
To make the muslin, I noted how much ease was allowed compared to the body measurements for a set size, and then took my actual measurements and added on the ease to adjust the pattern to fit me. But this was a bit of a failure - perfect around the bust and waist, but ridiculous around the hips! If it looks like a balloon now, it was 10 times worse before. There is 4 inches of ease around the hips in the pattern, and that just doesn't seem to work in a stiff satin fabric.
I slept on it, and this morning decided to try another pattern. The pattern I'm using for the bridesmaid dresses might be perfect. It is Vogue 7848. The reason I picked Vogue 2237 in the first place is because it seems a posher dress. It is fully lined, and has a foundation and inside belt. But, now I have that pattern, I can see how these things are done, and add them to the less well finished dress in Vogue 7848.
I don't know if you guys remember the dress I want to copy? It's here. I think V7848 is closer to that dress anyway (I was always going to add on the little skirt and full skirts at the bottom), the only difference is that it flares out more. But surely I could just cut all the panels to go straight from the hip down, and that would work? Any thoughts?
Instead of making a muslin straight away for this dress, I will just make the second bridesmaid dress, because the second bridesmaid is my size anyway (just several inches taller!), and try it on myself before giving it to her! Then if it needs adjusting, make YET ANOTHER muslin for myself.
You guys realise the wedding is only THREE MONTHS away now! Aaaaargh!
Posted by jen at 01:13 PM | Comments (14)
