Wedding series 3 – Cakes and favours

Yes you heard me right: ‘cakeS’, there were plural.

Originally the plan was that my mum would make the wedding cake, as she was a dab hand in the kitchen, but unfortunately that was not meant to be.
Instead we put the cake bake challenge to my sister Jennifer, my close friend Rachel and Dave’s mum Ruth with the idea of splitting the task & having three different kinds of sugary baked goodness to appeal to different tastes.
They all went above and beyond the call of duty and the result was an amazing cake extravaganza!

Jennifer's 2-part cake feat was festival woodland themed and came complete with Glastonbury backdrop. A delicious Madeira sponge with a white chocolate buttercream filing – YUM!! She stayed at our house a few days before the wedding to prepare it and put in some seriously hard graft.
The use of the Syllvanian Families characters is a stroke of genius.

 Rachel’s creation was woodland festival inspired. A nut free (as I’m allergic) carrot cake, topped with butter cream and decorated with mint foliage – mmmmmmm! This was surrounded by several flower ‘chocolate pots’ complete with a crumbled Oreo soil. Sadly somehow I missed out on these…too slow.

Last but not least was Ruth’s very elegant and traditionally styled, wedding fruit cake, decorated with individually cut, white icing flowers.
Dave and I polished the remaining piece off a couple of week’s ago. I’ll admit I’m not usually a fruit cake fan but it was damn fine cake!

Do you remember I mentioned that my good friend Helen from White Fox a Fortnum and Mason supplier, was providing us with chocolate wedding favours as a gift? Well at the time I didn’t want to give the game away but now I can say that the favours were actually milk chocolate, muddy wellingtons. A seriously talented chocolatier Helen went to all the trouble of creating a left and right boot complete with top buckle and tread. They were awesome! Unfortunately one thing we didn’t consider was that the weather would be quite so hot on that day, so most of the wellies melted in the sun. It was such a shame walking into the marquee & seeing in place of the boxed up wellies little chocolate puddles. Still they were tasty puddles! Luckily I took photos of the samples we were sent pre-wedding:

Without a doubt the tastiest wellies ever to be made!

Sampler

Yay i've finally managed to get round to doing some professionally printed sample booklets of my work. I had planned on getting these made up many months ago but with  so much going on didn't mange to do them until now. Better late than never I guess. Each booklet has 10 images including the front and back covers.

I'll be sending these round to publishers and a few agents in the hope of getting on a few lists - wish me luck!

Wedding installment 2 - The Makes

It didn’t take long after accepting the marriage proposal for my mind to jump to all the stuff I could potentially make for the big day….
Hold on, time out!  Before I continue with this post & the remaining installments i’ve just decided, for ease t refer to the wedding day itself as ‘bd’ – (I hope to God, that acronym doesn’t stand for some kind of rude phrase anywhere) short, of course, for ‘big day’!

Ok so back to it, I realized that the 'bd' was the perfect excuse to indulge my making addiction. Woohoop!
Now lets see what did I make:

• 1x15 foot long vintage bunting created over several sittings, using mostly scraps from an extensive stock of fabric

• 8 large applique flags with help from a good friend (Binny – thank you). These were put up around the garden in our ‘main stage’ area. Will show some pics from the stage later. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos of all of these when we made them & i've since given a few away, but heres a pic of one I still have  -

• 16 table trees and stands - part of our table decorations. There were 2 trees different per table. A great idea initially but unfortunately they didn’t go quite to plan as the card I used to print the design onto turned out not to be sturdy enough to enable the tree to stand un-aided. I only discovered this after printing all the trees…that’s a lot of printing.
  So the only way to make them stand, was to design & make each one a separate card stand with a lot of help from my now husband…still can’t get used to that word. All in all a hell of a lot of work!

• Yes and the list goes on.....8 table wigwams & mini flags. Like the trees these were my own designs printed and cut from card. They were then rolled up and the sides sewn together. Each one then had a bbq skewer split and put inside to give them that authentic wigwam look. Then  a little cocktail stick flag with the number of the table drawn on was put in the top of  each tent.

•  8 lengths of mini bunting which was stretched between the table trees over the wigwams.

• 2x rainbow raindrop decorations to hang from the trees.

• Signs – oh hold on now Dave did most of this so I can’t take credit. A must for any festival, otherwise how will people know how to find the 'long drops' after several pints of cider.
  The signs were produced from thick, brown box card as it looked kind of like wood and attached to a wooden garden stake

• Cloud pinata. Actually again i had minimal involvement in this, as it was Dave's baby. The photo below is of it in the making.
  Soooooo much work went into this giant creation that mentioning it briefly in this post wouldn't really do it justice so i'll come back to this much loved make in the not too distant future: 

Hmm, so  guess I/we got a little carried away - but its a one off right!

P.S. Oh and did I mention the 60 festival programmes/ order of services, the 8 medicine bottle decorations and........okay, ok i'll shut up & go away.

Budget Home Improvement

Before continuing the marathon of wedding blog posts…just kidding, will keep them to a minimum I promise, i’m going to share with you a home improvement project kindly funded by the folks at MoneySupermarket.com.

I got word that they were running a competition: £50 to do a budget home improvement & then blog about the project. Yeah pretty ace huh?!  Well I couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially seeing as that pony doesn’t come round visiting too often, so I took up the challenge.

For a long while i’ve wanted to create an art wall in our living room using a salon-style hanging. If you’re not familiar with this it is basically a way of displaying several differently sized framed pictures on a wall in a more unconventional fashion to create an eye catching feature. Here is an example of a fab one I found on Pinterest:



This seemed like the ideal opportunity to do this, so here’s my ‘£50 salon-style feature wall, home improvement tutorial’-

1. First off you need some art... actually no scrap that! First off you need a wall which needs pimping. Here's mine:

Think you'll agree this definitely needs improving.

2. Now for the art, photos or other imagery for your wall. I would suggest no less than 6 hangings in the feature. Now obviously £50 isn’t going to get you a couple of Picasso’s, the latest Saatchi artist’s work or most likely even a single artwork from your local gallery. Therefore what goes in the frames has to be cheap or better still free. There are many ways you can do this:

a. If you like getting creative then its easy, make some art;  an abstract painting; a simple print that can easily be created at home such as a stencil or lino cut; a pencil drawing; or a simple typographical artwork made on your computer & home printer; a uber cool collage from old magazines/books/annuals…the list goes on. Basically its easy to create cheap and good looking art if you have at least 1 creative bone in your body and most people do.

b. You may already have some art or photos etc (possibly already framed) which could go into the hanging.

c. Alternatively from the £50 put aside a small budget of £20, then go hunting for some low cost art. You might be pleasantly surprised & find a charity shop harbouring a dusty but lovely painting for £4 , or a car boot sale might reveal something equally awesome. Try visiting a local craft market and see if there is anything you like in your budget; perhaps an artist is selling some great postcards with their work on - these could look great in a frame, particularly with a picture mount border.

3. Time for the frames! This is what most of your £50 budget will need to go on and it is indeed pretty much where all of mine went, seeing as I already had the art.
If you’ve already spent £20 of it on artwork then you’ll only have £30 left. Yes…it may not seem like a lot, but there are plenty of places to get cheap frames particularly as they don’t all have to be the same size or type. It just requires a little time to hunt for them. Try:

a. Charity shops - an excellent source for cheap, and often good quality and unusual frames!

b. Car boot sales/flea markets/jumble sales.

c. Shops like Ikea and Wilkinsons do frames at very low cost.

d. Maybe you already have a couple of frames lying around the house that you can use, or perhaps your folks might have one spare.

Keep in mind the size of work when looking for frames but don't worry much as photo mounts (which often come in the frames if buying them from Wilkos) will create a border for your image, so mostly the work won’t need to be a perfect fit for the frame. You can buy picture mounts cheaply on ebay. My frames have come from the following places Ikea, Wilkinsons, a charity shop, a low cost but quality local framing warehouse which I’m lucky to have not too far away from me (Factory Framing Centre) and I already had a lovely framed piece of art as a wedding present which went in the mix.

4. Once you’ve framed your images find a space on the floor big enough to lay your frames out and play around with the display. It’s important to bear in mind which frames work better alongside each other the shape of the wall and of course the size. Once you’ve decided on your format for the display, grab a camera and take a quick snap of the layout on the floor. This will be used as reference later.

 














5. Next create templates by placing each frame on some sheets of old newspaper (or other suitably sized paper you have spare), drawing around them & cutting them out. I would suggest marking on each paper template piece the name of the corresponding pic i.e. this piece relates to the framed fox artwork:

6. Ok now for the tricky bit. For this you’ll need a spirit level (which I’m afraid I didn’t budget for as I already had one) to ensure all your frames are level.
Take your templates and with blue tac begin organising them on the wall using your photo reference and the level to ensure they’re in the correct position and straight.

 
7. Like me you’ll probably find each of your frames have a different kind of hook i.e. D rings or mirror plates etc. Depending on the style of hook this will effect the positioning of your frames on the wall e.g. if you’re hanging with string/picture wire you’ll need to consider the stretch of the wire as to where the frame sits. Sounds a bit complicated doesn’t it?
Actually its not too difficult as long as you measure exactly where the nail needs to go in the wall. For example if it’s a deep frame and you can hang it from a single nail: simply measure the distance from the top of frame to where the nail needs to be and the centre point between left & right side. Then on that frame’s paper counterpart tacked to the wall, mark the point where the nail should go using your measurements and hammer away!

8. You can hammer the nail straight through the paper template & remove them afterwards. It’s a good idea before removing the templates to test out each frame as you go, against its paper counterpart and make sure it sits right.

9. Once you know each frame sits in the correct position, take down the paper pieces and put up all your pictures making sure they’re nice and level. Et voila! An eye catching feature to transform what was once a sad bare wall -

Hope you like it!
Oh and just before i go, just want to point out that it probably seems pretty narcissistic creating a an art wall only from my art, but this is temporary and once i have some more spare cash i intend to replace some of it with work from other artists whose work i admire. This is a bit too much like having a wall of images of my own face - Aahhh!!

Planning for a festival

This time last week I was waking up in a very, very hot tent in Suffolk for the start of Latitude festival. Hence the no post last Friday. The decision to go to Latitude was pretty last minute as we were unsure at first because the date was so close to the wedding - we knew if we went we'd be totally knacked. In the end we decided to go, mainly because  the lure of Kraftwerk and a special 3D show was all too much.  So we went and we were totally knacked! But it was still ace and look i've kept my 3D glasses as a momento:

So I did say there would be more posts about the wedding, although i will try not to bore you by going on about it too much. As that its all go on the festival front this seems like the prefect opportunity to give a little insight to our wedding planning.

Before we even started talking about planning the day we both knew that traditional weddings weren't our thing and wanted to do something unconventional. Within minutes we agreed that what we'd really love to do was to have a mini festival in tribute to our original meeting at Glastonbury in 2004.

The 1st thing we did was to choose a summer date which statistically had the least rain fall - the internet is a wonderful thing my friends! Then about 15 months before the booked date we set about looking at a venue...or more accurately a suitable field.
It became quickly became apparent that going down the festival in a field route wasn't going to fit our budget, seeing as the only response to our 'field hire' requests came back with a quote of £1000 for a small piece of land. This was before even looking at the cost to hire toilets, a water supply, caterers, a generator, PA, tent, bands....and the list goes on.

What we needed was an affordable venue with a good outdoor space so we could use the venue's power supply & facilities and also use their garden for our bands. To cut a long story short after months and months of searching & one or two set backs along the way we finally found a place. The hotel has a great garden with lots of different areas, so there is a lot of scope to play around. Its also liscensed for weddings and has a gorgeous Georgian ballroom - a perfect fit. Plus it was very affordable, with incredibly accommodating staff who were willing to let us hold a mini festival in their back garden!

Yay...now that we'd finally identified a venue and set the date, i could get onto the first fun job of creating the invites. Its sad to admint but i'd been looking forward to making the invites since getting engaged.

Firstly all festivals need a name...Wedstock was born!

It felt right that the invite should be fun & colourful, but i also wanted to use the idea of a ticket somewhere to make it feel like a bonafide festival. 

I decided to make a separate RSVP which would be the festival ticket, complete with hologram security sticker for added effect! 

 

Even added a QR code on the RSVP ticket which linked to our festival wedding website. Although not sure many people got that bit!

So the planning of 'Wedstock' had begun...TBC

Catch up

Yes this means i'm back. I'm now a 'Mrs'.... Eeeek that sounds a bit too grown up - scary!

Its been almost a month since I last blogged and there is a lot of catching up to do, so over the next few weeks i'll sharing with you all the fun from 'Wedstock', our festival wedding and my many, many creations for the big day. First off, let me show you the ring:

Not sure yet about the whole changing name thing. Although I do quite like the sound of Lucy Webb over Lucy Farfort. Many of our friends have gone down the double barreled route but we decided that our surnames really didn't fit together well enough - far too much of a mouthful.
I probably will change my name but it might take a while to get round to doing it...particularly as both Dave & I forgot to collect the wedding certificate. Doh! Thankfully the registrar gave it to Dave's dad to look after.

You can expect to see a lot of wedding related posts over next few weeks so soon you'll be well and truly sick of reading about it :)
In the meantime I want to mention some unexpected residents in our back yard several weeks ago. I desperately wanted to share this with you back in June but with preparing for the wedding i just didn't have time. I did though, take lots of photos so i could come back to it when I had time. Last year we had a blackbird ma and pa make their nest on top of a piece of wood in our back yard. What with their nest being next to where we store our kayaks the poor things didn't exactly get a lot of peace given that we had to move the kayaks in and out. However ma black bird endured and successfully fledged two little birdies.

We were pretty sure that given the noise last year, there was no way they'd be back this year, but we were wrong! In a yard we have an old, metal office style cabinet which we use for storing garden tools. The cabinet is situated under a sheet of corrugated plastic which forms a basic roof, sheltering part of the yard from the rain....yes the whole thing is pretty 'rustic' looking to say the least.
The space between the top of the cabinet and under the plastic roof acts like a greenhouse, so early in June Dave moved about 6 potted tomato plants up there to help them grow.
Anyway a couple of days later when he went to water them, much to his chagrin (now there's a word I don't get to use often), almost all the plants had been pulled out and carefully arranged into a single pot. Yes you guessed it, ma and pa blackbird were back and had decided to make a flower pot nest with the addition of the young tomato plants for some extra comfy green bedding! The remaining plants were swiftly moved away to somewhere safer.
Here are 3 of the 4 little hatch-lings in their flower pot nest:

Amazingly the blackbirds managed to get all 4 of their brood to fledge!
Once out of their pot the little chicks spent a few days in the yard testing out their wings before moving out into the big wide world. I managed to get some photos of the fluffy fellows -

Are they cute or what?!
I like to think they will all still be out there now and perhaps in a year or so's time this year's chicks will be making nests of their own.
Bye bye birdies!

Under a month to go!

Sorry for the lack of blogging i've just not had a chance to even think these last few weeks as i've got a ton of work on and the 6th July wedding is drawing ever closer. Of course... I have inevitable made a rod for my own back because I couldn't resist making most of the wedding stuff myself and thus now i am pulling my hair out.
I'm afraid to say that i very much doubt i will have anytime for blogging in the next month, until after the wedding. So the next time you hear from me I may be a Mrs...gulp.
In the meantime i want to share with you a little design i have just finished for the cover of our mini festival wedding programme -

I'm looking forward to blogging about all the other stuff I made for 'Wedstock' after the event, but for now as we're trying to keep a lot of things secret its all on the QT.
Just before i go there is one thing which i'm particularly excited about, which although i can't show you I can tell you a bit about, and thats the wedding favours.
All i'll say is that my very good friend Helen is making the favours as a gift. Helen is an uber talented professional Chocolatier who supplies for Fortum and Mason in London. This is her site: http://www.white-fox.co.uk/
Go check it out now it is absolutely amazing. Have a good look at her stuff & prepare to be wowed... and yes those socks are chocolate!