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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Lace, lace and more lace

After over two months of knitting, here is the finished Print O’ the Wave:

Pattern: Print O’ the Wave by Eunny Jang

Yarn: Knitwitches 2-ply silk, colourway “Lush Seas”

It’s blocked beautifully and I am so pleased with it. You can’t see the full depth of colour in the photo, but it varies from deep purple through teal and sapphire to sky blue. It’s going to look amazing with my purple wedding dress. Ironically, I put in lifeline after lifeline and never had to rip it once (I had to do a bit of tinking, but nothing too serious). I would really recommend this as a first time “proper” lace project – as the centre panel is only patterned on right-side rows, it’s not too hard to keep track of. I definitely foresee more lace in my future!

Actually, I decided a lace cardigan for summer was on the cards, so I can wear my strappy tops for school without looking indecent. I have some Louisa Harding Grace in a pale beige/gold colour that I’ve been searching for a pattern for, and after rejecting many shrug patterns as I wanted more of a cardigan, finally decided on Ysolda’s Liesl. The problem is, the pattern is written for an aran-weight yarn and while the Grace is somewhat thick-and-thin, approaching worsted in places, it’s definitely lighter than that specified by the pattern.

I don’t want to go up past a 6mm needle or the fabric will be too holey. I’ve made several swatches. It’s hard to tell if my lace swatch is the right size or not – it was when I blocked it, but when unpinned it’s much smaller than the specified 4 inches unless I stretch it. I know the cardigan will stretch when worn and the weight of it will pull the lace open, but I’m not sure. So I did a stocking stitch swatch. Without washing it (the yarn has been knitted and washed before so I’m not too worried, although I probably will wash it tomorrow) I get 16 st/4 in, rather than the 13 st the pattern calls for. This is 81% of the full size, and happily that means that if I knit the size 42, if it works up at 81% of the full size it’ll be a size 34.

I’m still a bit concerned it will turn out too big, but I’ll just have to start knitting and see how it looks!

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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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Potential

This is our allotment as of this afternoon. The green manure is all dug in, the beds are all dug over, and there are sheets of plastic and glass laid out on the beds we’re going to use first to warm the soil. It may not look like much, but there are tiny buds in the fruit bushes, and in the mini greenhouse are the sweet pea seedlings we’ve been nurturing all winter, ready to (hopefully) produce lots of flowers for the wedding in July. The strawberries are just starting to grow new leaves and next door’s mint is invading already. It must be spring!

In knitting news, I have put Vivian aside and cast on for Print O’ the Wave. After all, I have a very real deadline for it and I can always go back to Vivian when I’m not feeling up to lace. I’ve managed one pattern repeat without mishap, and put in a lifeline of dental floss (thanks to Susan for that tip! Unlike the sock yarn that I was going to use, the floss is thin enough to thread through the hole at the base of my Options tip and the lifeline made itself as I knit). Expect lots of incremental progress updates here soon…

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Waves of silk

Remember this?

It’s the Knitwitches 2-ply silk that I bought at Woolfest last summer. It was going to be a Muir, but I never got any further than casting on. Something just wasn’t right. I’d always intended to make Muir in green, or a variegated green/brown yarn. After all, it’s a leaf lace pattern, so my logical brain told me it must be green. The Knitwitches stall didn’t have anything in that colour in silk, and I completely fell in love with this yarn – it’s full of rich shades of teal, with tiny splashes of purple.

So it’s been languishing in my stash for several months. Then I bought a purple wedding dress. And I thought, hey, that teal silk would make a fabulous stole to go with a purple silk dress. So the last few days I’ve been browsing patterns on Ravelry (as anyone who has me as a Ravelry friend will have noticed from the number of stole patterns I’ve been favouriting!). I had two criteria: it had to be a stole, rather than a triangular shawl, and it had to have a pattern that would work well with the rich teal colours.

I’ve discovered some truly gorgeous stole patterns. I still want to make Muir one day, but I’m also seriously tempted by Hanami and the Honeybee Stole. But for the teal silk, I decided that the pattern just had to have some sort of water or wave theme – after all, the colourway is aptly named “Lush Seas”. So eventually I settled on Eunny’s classic Print o’ the Wave. Aptly for a wedding in Scotland, it’s based on a traditional Shetland pattern. And the lace pattern repeat is significantly shorter than that for Muir, which should hopefully make it more manageable for me. After all, the only lace I’ve knitted before has been socks. I’m going to knit it all in one direction, as I don’t like the look of the graft up the middle. What’s wrong with a bit of asymmetry?

I’m itching to cast on, but I feel I should finish Vivian first. It’s been abandoned while I knitted a baby cardigan for my friend S (the cardi is very cute, and I will take photos when I have sewn on the buttons). I know that if I don’t finish Vivian now, the project will get abandoned all summer and I won’t have a clue what I’m doing when I pick it up again.

However, the wedding is in 4 months and I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish Print o’ the Wave in that time. Any of you more experienced lace knitters care to tell me whether that’s achievable or a completely bonkers deadline? I was also thinking of knitting wee roses as corsages, but I might not bother with that.

Now all I need to do is persuade my sister, who is going to be my Maid of Honour, that she would look fabulous in teal…

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Roses

I finished Rose Red earlier in the week and I’ve been wearing it a lot.

Pattern: Rose Red by Ysolda Teague

Yarn: Fyberspates Scrumptious DK

Ravelled here

The colour is slightly more blue than the picture indicates. Happily, it perfectly matches my purple velvet scarf (although I’m very tempted to buy more of the yarn for some sort of cowl).

I had some yarn left over, so I had a brainwave and searched Ravelry for flower patterns. Which resulted in this:

Pattern: Simple Knitted Rose and Leaf by Sarah M Hughes

Yarn: Fyberspates Scrumptious DK and Natural Dye Studio Dazzle BFL sock yarn, held double

Ravelled here

I still need to sew the rose and leaf together and attach it to a pin so I can wear it on my coat as a brooch. Now I’m thinking that I might knit the corsages and buttonholes for our wedding. Who knows, I might even knit myself a bouquet – I wasn’t going to bother with one, but I’ve liked this pattern for knitted lillies on Knitty since I first saw it.

I’ve started work on Vivian, but I’ve not got any further than casting on so far.

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A wee announcement

Some of you already know this, but for those who don’t:

The Fella and I have decided, after 10 years together, that we’re actually going to get married.

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