Wondrously well wed

On Saturday, after 11 years together, Chris and I finally got married. It was the most amazing day and everything just came together like magic, despite worries over the food and the weather. It was perfect. The ceremony was beautiful, the weather was gorgeous (despite the fact that it’s been mostly raining for the last week), the hog roast was amazing and the dancing went on till nearly midnight (after which we all went to the pub for an hour!).

I don’t have many photos yet but here are a few that my cousin took:

My Maid of Honour (my sister, Anna), Chris and I walking to the ceremony (I’m modelling Print O’ the Wave!).

Chris and I after the ceremony (Chris is juggling his baby nephew while trying to get something out of his sporran).

The cake, finally assembled!

The wedding party and assembled friends and family!

We are off to Skye on Saturday for our honeymoon – but before we go I may have some yarn to show you…

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More wedding crafting

Last winter I knit a small rose brooch (Ravelry link) from some leftover Fyberspates yarn. Mum loved it, and made me promise to knit several for use as buttonholes and corsages for the wedding. I’ve been working on them on and off for ages, and today I finally finished them:

There’s no particular code regarding purple vs blue or pink vs blue hearts – there are enough for everyone at the top table, immediate family, and people giving readings. Everyone can just pick the one they like. (The background in that photo is the white board I bought to make a big seating plan – I’ll be keeping that after the wedding for knitting photography purposes!)

In non-wedding-related knitting, I cast on a couple of weeks ago for Cayman (Ravelry link). It was very much an impulse knit – it was the first day of the summer holidays, and I was sitting outside my favourite coffee shop in Stirling reading Yarn Forward magazine, and I thought, “That’s a nice sweater. It would be good to slip on in the evenings on honeymoon.” And luckily (or perhaps unluckily) McAree’s is right across the road from the coffee shop. And before I knew it, I’d purchased a whole bunch of Rowan Summer Tweed in a lovely pale sage green.

So I cast on, and promptly realised that the artful manner in which the model is slouching in a chair in the photo disguises the fact that the pattern has no shaping other than some ribbing. So I added some waist shaping. The ribbing also changed from a baby cable rib to plain rib after a couple of inches (I guess this would add a bit of shaping, but the ribbing starts below the natural waist), so I decided to make it all baby cable rib because I thought the transition looked weird in the photos. I also omitted the short-row shaping on the collar, because I didn’t want the collar to be so high at the back.

Here’s my progress so far:

I’m very happy with the fit and the shaping (if my swatch is not lying then it should gain a bit of ease when I wash it) and I think the weird ruffling around the collar will go away when the collar is properly sewn down at the front, sleeves are added, and it’s blocked. But I’m not happy with the ribbing.  Because I’ve kept it all in baby cable rib, it pulls tighter than it should over the hips, leaving the split sides (which you can’t see in the photo) gaping and looking very unflattering across my belly!

The current plan: frog back to the stocking stitch portion, knit a couple more inches in stocking stitch, then switch to plain 3×2 rib (abandoning the baby cable rib altogether) and knit it a couple of inches longer than it currently is. A plain rib should have a bit more ease than the cable rib, but I’m wondering whether to stick in a more increases as well.

So I’m looking for advice, dear readers! What should I do with the bottom of this sweater to make it more flattering? Is my plan of a longer stocking stitch portion followed by plain rib a good one?

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Wedding cake

Remember the Very Important Cake?

Well, they (for there are three of them) are now finished!

After I finished baking them I wrapped them in greaseproof paper and foil and stuck them in a cupboard, getting them out every few weeks to “feed” them with more brandy. While we moved house they, along with other precious wedding items, stayed with a friend to avoid any mishaps. And now, with only a week to go (!!), I decided it was time to ice them.

Here in Dunblane we have an excellent cake shop, Celebration Stations. As well as fabulous cakes, they sell all manner of baking paraphenalia and freely give out great advice to amateur bakers like me! They supplied and coloured the sprays of sugar flowers. I also found this video on the Internet that gave me some pointers (why had I never thought of turning the cakes upside-down before?). I have borrowed Jackie’s cake stand and recruited her to be in charge of cake assembly on the big day, and now the cakes have been very carefully placed in boxes and will remain there until they need to be displayed for the wedding!

Here’s a close-up of the middle tier:

I am very, very proud of the way these cakes have turned out. I just hope they taste as good as they look!

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Normal service will resume eventually

I’m into Phase II of the great wedding cake baking project. The largest tier is currently in the oven, and I expect it to stay there for at least another 6 hours.  I had to make up the mixture in two batches, as there was absolutely no way it would all fit in even Auntie Frida’s massive mixing bowl.

I haven’t been updating much lately. My photography project has pretty much been abandoned, as has my plan to run the Loch Leven half marathon next weekend. Taekwon-do is happening once a week, and I’m not pushing myself to start training more often just yet. The reason for all this cutting back?

We have accepted an offer on our flat, and had an offer accepted in turn on a gorgeous listed cottage. The big move is still about 6 weeks away and it could all fall through in the meantime, but assuming it all goes to plan we are faced with the prospect of packing up 4 years’ worth of accumulated stuff and shifting it about 200 yards down the road. And about a month after the move we’re getting married.

So I’m cutting back. My priorities at the moment are to keep the allotment under control, keep on top of my work, move house and get married. Everything else is very much Not Getting Done unless I feel like it, and have time. I’m still going to update here with odd photos, knitting projects etc but I’m very deliberately not putting any more pressure on myself!

It’s all very exciting. Please keep your fingers crossed for us that everything goes smoothly!

And just to include a photo – I never did get round to another wedding ring shoot, and I ended up tweaking and using this image on the invitations (which will be going out soon!):

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A Very Important Cake

The fruit had been soaking in brandy for over a week, the ingredients were all to hand, and after I got back from taekwon-do I had the whole afternoon without a pressing reason to leave the flat (apart from the sunshine, but hopefully that will still be there tomorrow). So it was time to start work on our wedding cake.

My friend Jackie gave me an awesome fruit cake recipe that she used for her own wedding, and I trialled it at Christmas. It was probably the best Christmas cake I’d ever tasted; dark, moist and richly fruity (and alcoholic).  So today it was time to make the real thing. Jackie lent me her cake tins, and I wrote up a spreadsheet in Excel to scale the recipe to the correct quantities for each tin.

Today I made the small and medium tiers – the large tier will require the entire oven to itself. I made up a huge batch of mixture (thank heavens for the large mixing bowl I inherited from Auntie Frida).

From top left, clockwise:

• Flour, ground almond, bicarb and spices
• Fruit (soaked in brandy for a week) in a little flour
• Eggs, treacle, zest and marmalade
• Butter and sugar

Assembly took some time as it involved folding in a spoonful of flour mixture, followed by some egg mixture, ad infinitum.

But eventually it was spooned out into the tins and smoothed down:

After this, the tins were wrapped in brown paper and placed very carefully in the oven for the whole afternoon. They’re still there, in fact, but they’re nearly done.

In other wedding-related crafting, I am now on the outer border of the Print O’ the Wave. I’ve done 11 repeats – one short edge and a corner. Ironically, despite putting in lifelines religiously, I haven’t needed to frog once (so far!), while Vivian (not wedding related) is totally kicking my ass at the moment. The yoke section of the pattern has no stitch counts at all, and I’ve already screwed up the decreases once and had to rip back (I foolishly didn’t put in a lifeline on the joining row, and couldn’t get one in straight, but as the yarn is aran and pure wool picking up the live stitches was quite easy). It’s further complicated by the fact that I’ve made sleeves 3 sizes bigger than the body, as they were too skinny for my arms.  Hoping someone on Ravelry will reply to my plea for help in the Vivian KAL!

Back to wedding crafting. I have knit 3 little roses out of the purple Fyberspates Scrumptious leftover from my Rose Red beret. I think if I’m going to make all the corsages and buttonholes out of the same yarn I’ll need a new skein – what hardship! Then I need some green yarn to make the leaves. And brooch pins. And a pretty bead to put in the middle of each rose.

I’m also in the process of taking photos for the invitations. We are hoping to get Moo postcards with a collage of meaningful photos on the front. The main one will be of the rings. To this end, I borrowed our friend Ben’s macro lens and spent some time playing around with it the other day.

All I can say is, macro photography is MAGIC. The letters on the engraving are only a few millimetres tall. And you can even see the weave in the pillowcase I used as a background! I’m going to have another photoshoot, hopefully tomorrow, and I plan to make a few changes:

• Use something smoother (paper?) as a background
• Stop it up a bit (or should that be down?) – the depth-of-field is a bit too small at F2.8
• Polish the rings! They look shiny and clean to the eye, but the macro lens reveals all my grubby fingerprints
• Wait for a time with more diffuse light so I don’t get reflections of the sunny window.

And now it’s less than 3 months to the date (woo!) I can get on with filling out the boring paperwork…

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