It's been a year

I married my Matey just over a year ago and it was, and still is, great! At some point I may go over some of the mad DIY bits we did for the day but here are a few very general things that I think are worth bearing in mind if you are planning to tie the knot.

Phone everybody you’ll be inviting and tell them the good news. Don’t email. Yes you’ll get loads of lovely emails back but nothing beats spending a week having chats about it all with your friends and family, you will not stop smiling all week. You will also discover that by the end of it you have the first draft of your guest list

Decide as a couple which things are REALLY important to you and which things are not so vital if you have to sacrifice them?

Our cake was very simple with the words from 'The Red Tree' handprinted around it. Apparently it took nine hours for my brother-in-law to print. Simple doesn't mean quick or easy apparently!

Whatever your budget make a spreadsheet and list everything with expected costs. Things can add up so even if you buy a bargain for 50p for the wedding it goes on the spreadsheet.

You don’t have to have a theme if you don’t want one! You don’t have to have a colour scheme if you don’t want one! (Not having a colour scheme makes life so much easier. I did not want to spend hours trying to match a particular shade of anything) Dare I say that you don't have to have something old, new, borrowed, or blue if you don't want to.

Chocolate leaves!

Don't forget to focus as much, if not more, attention on the service itself. It is easy to get carried away with the fluffy stuff for the reception which is great fun to plot. The service is the point of the day (to state the bloomin' obvious) which  everybody is there to see and will be focusing  properly on with no distractions.

Making things for a wedding takes a lot of time and the materials are not always cheap. If you are on a budget do some calculations to see whether it really is cheaper. We designed our invitations, order of service, menus and thank you cards and printed them on beautiful thick card at home which would only fit through the print one sheet at time. With 400 bits of card to print we spent HOURS standing over the printer which died post honeymoon. Factor in the cost of a new printer, inks, wasted card and suddenly the cost of going pro is cheaper. In hindsight we should have designed them and had the lot printed professionally.

Oh the madness of scanning 100 images from classic books so each person had a different one in their place setting envelope. The words 'Whose idea was this?' may have been said a few time. I would do it all again though.

Be realistic with what can be achieved in the time you have. Look at how many months you have left and aim to be pretty much done a month before your wedding. Trust me you will have a lot to do in the last month so don’t leave making 200 metres of bunting till then. You will probably have loads of offers to help but it may prove impossible to coordinate so assume you are on your own and go yippee if jobs are taken off your plate.

Terrible photo. 100 cushions which took 5 days to make. I felt sick at the sight of them by the  end.

Just enjoy the day. Things will go wrong but nobody will know. You may not notice either. I spent hours fireproofing string to make jamjar lanterns for candles in the evening. Never got used and I didn't notice till we collected all our stuff three weeks later. At the end of the day you have just got married so does it really matter?!

If you can, take the greetings cards with you when you leave. It is weird when it goes from being everybody to just you two and there is no way you will go to sleep. Having a glass of fizz together while opening cards and talking about the day gets it all back to normal and ends the day with it just being the pair of you.

A jolly good stab at a patchwork quilt

There is a collection of children’s books called 'Green Knowe' by Lucy. M.Boston. The BBC dramatised the first ’The Children of Green Knowe' when I was just the right age for it. Being a bookworm I then read the series of rather spooky tales. There are a number of images that spring to mind when I think about the books, some that I was too scared to always read as a child. But there is one in particular. The patchwork quilt that Tolly's great-grandmother Mrs. Oldknowe mended while telling him tales about the house.

For our wedding in June I undertook the frankly mad project of covering 100 cushions for the seats. It took 5 days and on the final day I actually felt slightly sick at the thought of doing the final 15.

Post wedding I realised that I really do not need 100 cushions.

So I resolved to sell them. The problem was that our choice of fabric was so specific that nobody wanted them.In the end I sold the pads and pondered what to do with all the fabric I now had in the shape of square cushion covers. A patchworkquilt! 

So I pondered on this. Do I really have the time? No. But when has that ever stopped me? I googled it. To my dismay it appears to be a really, REALLY popular thing to do right now. Did I still want to do it? In the end a friend gave me belated birthday present of a book from the 70's about patchwork making.I was committed.

 First I chopped. Yes! I chopped the cushion covers that had taken so long to make into usable strips. My matey was silently watching me and clearly holding his tongue about this.

Then I realised that much as I wanted to use all the fabric some just wasn'tgoing to work. It was a pain in the bum for the cushions. I was not going to re-inflict the pain again for a quilt. This left me with only three striped fabrics indark blue, pale blue and pink. I had a brainwave. We had embroidered tablecloths on the tables and there was one that I couldn't sell because it was stained. Snip snip.

Next problem. I had enough squares to make a single quilt. I wanted a double. Of course I could have cheated and added more fabric from elsewhere but that wasn't the point. I could have chopped up the three tablecloths we decided to keep but that wasn't the point either. I had an idea. In the attic were the sweet pea bedsheets I had as a teenager, rather faded and suffering from an attack of the moths. We got married in my parents garden and the only flowers we had at our wedding were SWEET PEAS!

I started the easy bit of making the strips of squares. The tricky part of making a patchwork quilt is getting it so that all the seams match up. I cheated and put the seams off centre, brick wall style. (I'll aim for perfect next time.)

SO far so good. But I was out of tablecloth fabric and it wasn't big enough. It was also a tad pink and girly, dare I say twee? I was always going to back the quilt with as close a match as possible to my bridesmaids green cotton sundresses so I decided that I would add two borders. One in green and one in the fabrics I did have left.

Not ideal but big enough for me to stick with it. A blanket from the wedding (We had blankets for people to sit on the lawn with.) which had got a bit moth eaten served as the filling and the green fabric went on the back. Time for the tedious hand sewing the border part.

I then attempted to quilt the squares on the machine to make it a proper quilt.This really did not work. The fabric kept rucking up and looking awful. I ripped it all out and decide it was quite nice enough as it. Let's call it a patchwork blanket rather than a quilt.

Time taken. I did it in bits but I reckon that it took around 40 hours to put together.

Cost: The backing fabric was £18 and thread was £3. The rest I already had.

The verdict
Not bad!
All in all it's a pretty good first stab. It's far from perfect but it's nothing to be ashamed of either. Fortunately I do believe that there is no point in making something if it looks like it was made in a shop.