The Veil & The Wedding Day

My sister was convinced that she wanted to look a bit different on her special day and after we found her beautiful lace dress we started discussing vintage accessories.

I found lots of the American wedding blogs particularly inspiring as they feature lots of stylish retro weddings. If you're interested check out Wedding Chicks, Jesi Haack Weddings and Project Weddings. We decided that a birdcage style vintage veil would look amazing with the dress and would be a traditional touch without looking 'too traditional'. We saw lots of great veils on the always inspiring Etsy but none of them were quite right, and after making my own fascinator I assured my sister I could make her one. (Always over-confident!!)

After discussing some designs she found a wonderful vintage broach for the veil base while she was buying vintage jewellry to go with the wedding dress. We had a number of fittings at various stages and quickly realised that we must have very different shaped heads as the veil pinned at an angle on me looked completely different on her. This made it very difficult to finish the veil without her around. So I decided to leave cutting the veil section to the right length until the night before the wedding. This was also due to the fact that the weight of the brooch meant we were struggling to pin it into her hair and I was hoping the hairdresser would work some magic and come up with a solution! Fingers crossed!

However as is often the way we ended up catching up with friends and relations who had gathered for the wedding the night before and after drinking too much I confidently insisted we could just sort it out on the day!

So on the morning of the wedding not only had the crisp sunshine of the day before been replaced by a heavy fog, but I started to panic about the fact that with just hours to go I still hadn't finished the veil and cake. No pressure then!

So I went to the barn with my soon to be brother-in-law and the groomsmen as they were delivering the decorations and helping to set up. It was quite a relief to see at least one completed project arrive all finished. We had used purple and silver Christmas baubles as both name settings and wedding favours. They looked beautiful and festive on the day but had involved a good few hours of writing on the baubles and arranging them in gift boxes to look like mini Christmas pressies (photos to follow). After a nervous half hour stacking and then re-stacking the stars on the cake I headed to the house where my sister was getting ready. Luckily a few glasses of bubbles meant that she was showing no signs of nerves. And the fabulous hairdresser Sharon Wilkes-Burt managed to miraculously secure the veil with only a few expertly placed pins. Then the dreaded moment when I had to cut the veil to the desired shape. The nervous hairdresser and photographer looked on (being photographed while taking scissors to the veil wasn't helping!) and I hoped for the best, well aware that there wasn't a back up plan if I screwed it up. With a few pins and a few frayed nerves we finally got there.

My sister looked truly beautiful on her big day (she actually dropped over 2 dress sizes for the wedding!) and although making things for the wedding was hard work at times, it was a great privilege to be such an integral part of the celebration. And I learnt some important craft lessons along the way!

(Hopefully I'll have some better photos of the veil when the official photos arrive)

The Wedding Cake

After seeing the cake I made for a family friend's birthday (see below), my sister asked me to make one for her wedding to sit alongside the Cheese Wedding Cake (stacked whole wheels of West Country cheese - yum!). To be honest I was a bit worried about it as all the ingredients work out quite expensive so there was no real chance for a trial run. And I hadn't actually eaten any of the one I made before! So there was nothing for it but to just hope it worked out OK.

As my mum is Irish she assured me that as long as I followed the golden rules it should work out fine - soak the fruits in brandy for weeks beforehand, add some extra brandy, then once the fruitcake is made feed it with more brandy and if in doubt add more brandy!

The cooking all went fine, and the marzipan went without incident - the icing was another story. The first batch of icing kept cracking and after spending over an hour covering the first cake I had to admit it looked awful, remove the icing and resolved to fight the icing battle another day. As time was running out the second attempt was equally stressful - for the first cake I made the icing too thin. Then by over compensating for the top layer I ended up with super thick icing - I knew that while this looked smoother it meant that the desired size difference between the layers was no longer going to happen. Oh well!

I had a vague memory of seeing stacked silver stars on top of a Christmas cake in a magazine and had decided this would fit in well with the purple and silver wedding theme. However as I was cutting out the icing stars and adding edible glitter I realised that not only did I have no idea how to attach them but I wouldn't be able to drive an assembled cake down to the Cotswolds and I'd actually have to assemble it on the morning of the wedding! As a bridesmaid with plenty to do on the morning of the wedding already, having the stress of assembling the cake with only a vague idea of how I wanted it to look was indeed quite daunting!

I'm not sure how the venue staff moved the cake from one side of the room to the other as the stars were balanced on top with only a few stuck down but it survived. I definitely think I'd practice some more icing before doing anything as important as a wedding again!

Felt Flowers

So now that Christmas and New Year are over, I've finally got time to share some details of the craft projects I was working on for the my sister's wedding in December.

Before I get to the wedding itself I wanted to post some pictures of some felt badges that I made for the hen party. Over a blustery weekend in Brighton my sister's friends gathered to drink champagne, catch up and do a bit of dancing. On the Saturday we thought a Seaside Treasure hunt around the Brighton Lanes and on the pier would be a good way for the hens to get to know each other. And as a healthy bit of competition always helps to break the ice I came up with the idea of splitting people into teams with their own team badges.

As I love working with felt I decided some simple felt flowers would work best and it was a great excuse to buy some lovely new felt.

These are really simple and would make a great sewing project for children as they only really involved sewing on the button to attach the felt petals together and then sewing on the safety pin at the back.