Me and Mr Jones

After months of stress and planning and the nightmare of having to move house with only a month to go, our wedding day finally arrived on Saturday! I promised you photos, and here is a taster.

These were all taken by my wonderful friend Iain Sewell, otherwise known as Vollsanger. I'll share more when we get the official snaps back!

We fly out to San Fransisco on Wednesday, so it will be quite around here until we get back. I promise lots of photos of the honeymoon too!

Of packing and weddings

I realised today that I hadn't posted in a while. I've mostly been busy with wedding and house moving preparations, so have not had much time to do anything creative to post about!

Bridesmaid shoes for the girls
Wedding make up
The start of the packing

Most of the RSVPs have come back for the wedding now, so we are almost ready to make our table plan and finalise details with the caterer. Bridesmaid outfits are almost complete, all I need to get them now are cardigans which is proving harder than you'd think, as very few shops sell the same clothes in age 6 and age 13! Luckily I managed to find shoes in John Lewis that came in both a child 12 and an adult 4, otherwise they'd have been in different shoes too.

I had a free makeover at the bareMinerals counter in John Lewis too, and treated myself to the full set of makeup. Now all I have to do is practice and learn how to put it on myself. I was never much of a girly girl when I was younger, so was too busy climbing mountains and riding my bike through the woods to bother with things like learning how to wear makeup and style my hair. I've just bought myself a new curling wand too, so will spend some time between now and the wedding practicing with that too, to save on the cost of a hairdresser.

The house move is rushing up closer than the wedding, though, as we are moving out on the 10th April! We've hired a removal company this time, as we couldn't ask our friends to help move us again, not after last time. Last weekend we made a small start on the packing, and we are taking advantage of the long Easter weekend to get the bulk of it done. All of the books, DVDs, CDs and computer games are now packed away, and the mountain of boxes in the living room is growing.

I've also packed away all of my yarn and craft things.

It worries me slightly that last year when we moved, everything fit into one box (the same size as the one above), but today when I packed it all up, I filled two of them! There's more yarn, to be sure, but also more books, magazines and general hobby accessories. I've packed everything apart from my current three WIPs, although I'm not sure how much time I will have between now and the move to work on them all. I'd rather have the option though, than be sat here with some free time wanting to knit and not being able to.

My obnoxious socks, which I am knitting two at a time
on two sets of DPNs

I also kept back some books from the boxes, as I started re-reading A Song of Ice and Fire last week. As I finish each book, I put them back on the pile for packing. If that wasn't enough, we've also held back one DVD from the boxes too:

There's a theme here, do you see it?

As season three of Game of Thrones starts on Monday, we decided to get the first two seasons and watch them through so we can remind ourselves where we got to. I will admit, it is a little confusing, watching the TV series and reading the books at the same time (well, not exactly at the same time, that would be too weird). I'm already far ahead of the TV series in the books again, but it's been interesting to see just what HBO have changed and tweaked and left out.

I suspect my blogging will remain infrequent until the move has occurred and internet has been restored, which may not be for a couple of weeks after we move as we are upgrading to fibre broadband and have to wait until the 20th for the engineer to come and install it. When I do come back though, I will be back with a vengeance as the lovely Eskimimi has announced the dates of this year's annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, which is perfectly timed for the week I should be back online and back to normal!

Cake or death?

It was my hen do this weekend. Really brings it home how close the wedding is now! Two months to go! The lads all disappeared down to a rented cottage on the Welsh border, so my girlies and I gathered at my house for tea and cake.

This is just some of the cake. There was more. A lot more.

It was really, genuinely lovely to have [most] of my favourite ladies in the same place, chilling out, chatting, drinking Kir Royale and nibbling on a variety of cakes and sweet treats.

One of my friends brought me these beautiful flowers.

It was extremely civilised; not a plastic willy or feather boa in sight! In the evening we ventured into town, and ate dinner at an absolutely fabulous restaurant called Cosmo. It's an all you can eat buffet, but with cuisine from all over the world. I had crispy duck pancakes, lasagne and Yorkshire puddings, chicken korma and chips. Best of all was the dessert bar.

Neopolitan ice cream cone, dipped in a chocolate fountain

Haribo! For dessert! In a restaurant! Unbelievable.

It was the perfect choice of restaurant, as everyone could eat whatever kind of food they wanted, and a single priced, all you can eat buffet made totting up the bill afterwards so simple.

There was no raucous evening, and nothing embarrassing happened at all. In fact, I was in bed by half twelve!

The left over cake

There was so much cake, I have a mountain of leftovers. They will be coming into the office with me today, where I think I will have to spread them across several departments in order to make sure they all get eaten!

Adventures Ooop North

It's been a while since our last adventure, but on Thursday last week Jamie and I took advantage of cheap tickets and visited Warwick Castle.

We'd not been there before, so it's another English castle crossed off the list! I wasn't sure what to expect, now that the castle is owned by the Merlin Entertainment people (who also own Alton Towers, Madame Tussaudes etc). It turned out to be an interesting mix of actually interesting historical stuff, and entertaining aimed-at-children attractions.

Click through to embiggen

I did enjoy walking the walls and towers, although the hundreds of steps we had to climb were a bit of a struggle at times!

We were also massively lucky with the weather. Clear blue skies, with a rather stiff wind. The wind was good, because it meant we got to really see a good show when we stopped off to watch the Flight of the Eagles display.

Archie the Bald Eagle comes in to land on his trainer's wrist

Ernie the baby Milky Eagle Owl, demonstrating his hunting technique (badly)

Nikita the Stellar's Sea Eagle. Gorgeous bird, I am sad we didn't get to see her fly

Highlight of the day, though, had to be the firing of the trebuchet. Warwick Castle has the largest working siege engine in the world, and twice a day they fire a flaming missile from it to demonstrate how it works. I filmed the whole thing, from the moment they started to wind the arm down. If you just want to see it fire, skip ahead to about 8 mins.

The next morning we had a bit of time to kill before driving even further north, so we stopped off in Coventry to see the Cathedral and a dinosaur exhibition in the museum. We also found this beautiful 16th century almshouse as we were walking into the town centre.

The dinosaur exhibition was a little disappointing, but we did get to play with an animatronic Utahraptor that was used when filming Walking with Dinosaurs, so that was pretty cool.

I'd love to show you the final exciting part of our tour up north, as on Saturday I went wedding dress shopping! I hadn't intended to buy my dress there and then, as it was meant to be a fact finding trip with some of my friends who would miss out on the real dress shopping that would have taken place here with my bridesmaids. What I hadn't counted on was finding not just one, but two beautiful dresses, and making a snap decision to buy one of them because the price was so good, I got 10% off and had to order straight away to give myself time for the dress to be made and shipped over from Australia! It's by the designer Jean Fox and I am so excited to have bought my dress already! I am now searching for the perfect yarn to knit a shrug to wear with it.

Year of Projects Update 9th September

I had hoped to be using today's post to celebrate the completion of my first pair of knit socks. However, circumstances have been against me in the last couple of days, so they currently look like this:

I've got to the end of the gusset decreases, so only have the foot and toe to go and sock two will be done. Unfortunately, I can't see myself getting anything done on these in the next few days, as I managed to sprain my wrist again while out on a work do on Friday evening, so working with such small needles is currently impossible.

Moral of this story - don't attempt to do
gymnastics while drunk!

I have been able to crochet though, so have been working on the sofa bed afghan (not technically a YoP WIP).

The pile of squares is growing steadily; just 13 left to make now and I can start joining them. My plan is to weave in the ends of each square as it gets joined.

I might have got a lot more of it done today, but I have spent the last six hours doing nothing but wedding prep! I spent three hours designing the invitation cards, before getting the go ahead from Jamie to order them from Vistaprint. Then I spent another couple of hours designing all of the inserts to go in the cards, like venue directions, menu choices and RSVP cards.

Adobe Illustrator has been indispensable today

I ended my marathon of wedding planning by booking our honeymoon. We are heading to America, spending four nights in San Fransisco before transferring to Las Vegas for five nights. I am so excited about it! Any recommendations from all you local Americans for things to do/places to eat would be very welcome. In particular, I'm keen to get recommendations for restaurants in San Fransisco, as we will be celebrating my birthday while we are out there.