Wedding

Well, where should I start?! The wedding was truly awesome. The service and reception went even better than we had hoped for and we've had so many lovely comments since from people who clearly enjoyed it nearly as much as we did.

The service was in my church, with plenty of friends involved - we were married by one of my former housemates and another, Farli, preached a fantastic sermon (she preached on one of our readings, Ecclesiastes 4, 9-12 and even included some knitting references too) and also did the blessing. Yet another friend did the prayers, and another the Ecclesiastes reading. The friend who was meant to do the second reading had transport problems, so my Mum had to step in to read 1 Corinthians 13, 1-13!

We didn't realise at the time, but the organist on the day, who normally plays at my church, had injured his right arm, so another organist singing in the men's row of the choir kept turning round to play the right hand organ parts for him, whilst he did the left hand and the pedals! You would never have guessed!

It was, for the UK, a baking hot day - up to 29 degrees, which is a little too hot for me and the OH to be totally comfortable! It also meant that I couldn't wear my wedding shawl during the day and had to wait until the evening - who could have predicted that knowing what the weather is usually like here?!

This was designed and knitted for me (initially as a surprise, then she told me when she realised I might try and make one myself!) by Tabitha. Isn't it great?

We had a smallish reception for 50 people (plus 14 children) at the pub near the church, which proved to be an excellent choice.

They laid us out a lavish "afternoon tea" with canapés and salads, and we used their function room and garden for everyone to mingle. And the children to run riot with paper aeroplanes. I was glad we didn't go for a more formal reception as this worked perfectly for us and gave us a chance to have a chat with everyone there.

The pub also didn't bat an eyelid (well, OK, maybe slightly) at being asked to provide a small table near the food for the knitted wedding cake.

We put my bouquet and the bridesmaids' next to it and they all matched perfectly (take my word for it, the only photos we've got at the moment of the reception are the ones a friend took with my camera, which have all ended up in black and white!).

And then we went away on honeymoon for a week, but I will save that for a later post. We did manage to fit in three yarn shops whilst we were away...

Totally overwhelmed

Last Tuesday I had one of the more overwhelming evenings of my life. I already knew I'd got a special parcel on its way to me (it got as far as our front door on Monday and was retrieved from Staines post office on Saturday. No pics or further details yet as it is Something For Wearing At The Wedding and therefore cannot be revealed as the OH reads this blog). The others at knitting group had requested that I brought the OH along to last week's meeting, which I duly did, thinking that maybe they had a wedding card for us or something.

The "something" was right - look at this. A whole knitted wedding cake!! Isn't it cool?! The detail is absolutely amazing, right down to my hairdo and our wedding rings. And the flowers are in our wedding colour scheme. An enormous amount of work has gone into it as there are loads of little bits that had to be sewn together. So the OH makes his debut appearance on my blog in knitted format!

The pattern is apparently the Alan Dart wedding cake, but heavily adapted - look, ours has two tiers!

Then, just when I was getting totally overwhelmed and little over-emotional Wannaknit handed us a parcel passed on from Greensideknits in London.

Some members of the Archers Listeners group on Ravelry, had got in touch with each other and decided to form the "Ambridge Knitting Circle" (complete with its own secret Ravelry group!) and make us a wedding blanket! Each of the squares is something to do with the Archers, or related to us, and they have come from all over the place, been assembled by Greensideknits, who also knitted the borders using her own hand-dyed yarn (which, it turns out, is in the same colour as the bridesmaids dresses!), everyone supplied a postcard from where they live and there's also a little book with all the postcards in and an explanation of all the squares! Isn't it cool?!

So, again, totally overwhelming. I am planning to blog about all the squares properly and explain what they are, but I think that's going to have to wait until after the wedding now...

Thank you to everyone for the amazing gifts!

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, the Archers is a totally addictive soap on radio 4. I've only been listening to it for five or so years, but it quickly became addictive.

Reading group

I still go to a reading group once a month. It's a nice group with a mixture of working and retired people in it so a good mixture of ages and life experience. We choose the books from a lengthy list supplied by the library, basically of books they have multiple copies of. Last year's books weren't too good, but this year's have been a bit better. In March we had Lionel Shriver's "The post-birthday world", which I didn't get on well with. I found her "We need to talk about Kevin" compelling reading, but I just couldn't get into this one. It wasn't helped by being quite lengthy and with me attempting to read it at the same time as moving house. The plot is along the lines of "Sliding doors" as in two different outcomes develop from one point in time. Trouble was, I didn't care about the characters so I didn't really care about the developments in the story!

April's book was "The piano teacher" by Janice Y.K. Lee. OK, so it's not a great work of fiction, but it was a significant improvement on "The post-birthday world". It's highly readable and interesting, but not quite at the chick-lit end of the spectrum (not that there's nothing wrong with chick-lit by the way!). The action flits backwards and forwards between Hong Kong during the Second World War, and in the early 50s where people are dealing with the repercussions of the war. Some very interesting stuff, which made me want to go away and find out more about the history of the area. Some of the characters aren't particularly convincing though and seemed to be stereotypes rather than "real" though. A couple of reading group members had lived in Hong Kong back in the 70s so could tell us how true to life the book actually was too.

I'm not going to read May's book as the meeting will be when we're on honeymoon and I fancied a month off to catch up on some other reading. So the next reading group book I'll be reading will be Edith Wharton's "House of mirth" for the June meeting (actually in July!). Apart from the group books I'm still reading "Singled out" by Virginia Nicholson, which has been on the go for a while now.

Knitting-wise, I'm trying to decide what to knit next once Thermal is finished. I want to decide on a sock pattern to make with the Opal Cotton Farli sent me, I could do with some more cotton socks now the weather has finally turned warmer. I was also thinking about making the Tea Leaves Cardigan after reading LeafGreenKnits blog about it. I had thought about buying some yarn for this on honeymoon, but I also have this in my stash which would work?

We will be honeymooning in Stratford-upon-Avon and have rented an apartment in the centre for five nights. I've already identified one potential yarn shop to visit in Coventry (where we were planning to spend a day anyway) - the Yarn Gathering, which I read about on Knit the Knit's blog. We were hoping to go and see the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in action, but of course, have managed to choose the one week when there isn't anything on! But there are plenty of National Trust properties round there so we'll probably visit one or two of those.

Bank Holiday Monday and everything is shut

We had a bank holiday last weekend for the May Day holiday, so the Monday off work = bliss! . We decided to have a day off from frantic gardening/unpacking/wedding preparation and went to Twickenham for the day, where we'd been assured there were plenty of independent shops to look round.

Very true, but unfortunately most of them were shut for the bank holiday! Still, we had a good wander around, had lunch in an Italian café, tea (both) and brownie (me) in the bookshop café later on and just generally wandered.

The church (St Mary's) was very pretty from the outside, but locked so we couldn't see the inside. Apparently it opens on Sunday afternoons in summer if you want to see inside (and not go to a service).

We also wandered around the gardens near the river. Once all part of York House, a stately home which is now the town hall (it looks very nice for council offices, doesn't it?!).

The gardens are bisected by a road with a bridge over (so the original inhabitants didn't have to cross the road to enjoy their garden?) and run along by the Thames. This is the cascade, pool and Oceanides.

We also found Twickenham Museum, also shut for the bank holiday (which means a return trip sometime) and wandered to find the yarn shop, Mrs Moon, nearer St Margarets station than Twickenham. Of course, this was also shut, so I stared through the window at some rather tasty looking yarn. Definite return trip sometime?

The bookshop was one of the few shops open. It's very small, but an independent with an organic café at the back. It's a shame it's not bigger, but it's so nice to see an independent bookshop...
I bought "Nine parts of desire: the hidden world of Islamic women" by Geraldine Brooks as I thought it looked interesting.

This weekend one of my bridesmaids came to stay, partly to meet the OH for the first time (she totally approved and thought that he's lovely, which is very true, although I'm possibly biased so there is also some unbiased verification of this now), partly to do some wedding stuff. We went off into town and looked at make up. I had a makeover in the Body Shop:

I'm not sure what I think about the shop. I used to use them all the time when I was a teenager/student etc, but then they were bought by L'Oreal back in 2006 and I was sceptical about whether they'd retain the ethical stance that first attracted me to shopping there. But I still buy Ben and Jerry's, and Green and Black's, both of which have also been swallowed up by Evil Multinationals... I was impressed on this outing. I don't normally wear make up, and didn't want to try the make up counters in the dept store as the girls on there look like they put it on with a trowel (!!!). Not the look I was going for. The shop assistant in the Body Shop was very nice, not at all hard-selly, helped me choose some foundation, blusher and eye shadow, didn't force me into trying lip things or mascara (neither of which I wanted) and answered questions very patiently. There was no expectation I'd buy anything, she even said they could do a make-over on the wedding day for free (with donation to charity), and I liked the look she gave me - natural and subtle looking, so I was still recognisably me. So I may be going back there for shopping again!

This Sunday we also went beating the bounds, where we walked the (adapted) boundaries of the parish and the church wardens, erm, beat them with rods. Actually, it was a good excuse to walk around the parish, looking at Staines Moor and ending up back at the pub with a drink afterwards.
The church wardens did beat a few gates we came across,

but mostly we just walked. I was amazed at the variety of vegetation and wildlife (Staines Moor is an SSSI), considering we could hear the noise from the M25, A30 and Heathrow airport most of the time! We haven't had a lot of time so far to explore the local area so it was nice to get out in the "fresh" air for a while.