Wedding Stationary: Part III

The final paper wedding project was the order of service. For the most part it was made of repurposed invitation and 'save the date' artwork - for visual continuity as much as anything else. The front cover got printed onto brown kraft paper and that came out much better than anticipated.

The first page was a result of inspiration from The Natural Wedding Company blog. A thank you to everyone who was there to witness the service. Our wedding day wasn't just about us. A big part of our motivation was thanking everyone who'd given us so much support through the years. We've been together a long time and we've relied heavily on family and friends to prop us up even when they didn't realise they were doing it, especially during the PhD years. Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun finding their names too.

Front cover

'Thank You' page and 'The Owl and the Pussycat' (Edward Lear) - read brilliantly on the day by my sister and my niece.

The second reading was 'The Marriage of Psyche' by Kathleen Raine - although pulled by us from  the 'Ring of Bright Water' by Gavin Maxwell, where the otter sketches also come from.

A snuggled up Killer and Vince illustrated 'Reading the Banns' by Simon Armitage. We made a playlist for before the ceremony and had tracks for signing the register and leaving the hall - we listed them all on the back page. 

A detail of 'The Owl and the Pussycat' illustration - this was an adjusted scan of a mixed media style Valentine's Day card I made for Dan in... 2010? I think?

All the text was backed by a grey falling leaf pattern I originally made for the save the date card to stop the page looking so flat. It helped give the pages a more delicate and refined finish that I was quite pleased with.

Vincey Cat hides among the reeds...

Wedding Stationary: Part II

Dan gave me 'The Owl Service' by Alan Garner for my birthday in 2011. The story is about a girl named Ali who becomes possessed by a mad owl/flower/women spirit. It's a sixties folk horror classic about... well I'm not sure what it's about to be honest, but we loved it. The Owl Service became the nexus for planning our wedding.

Part of the reason we wanted to send out real invitations (apart from the fact we just like them) was to get people excited and give them an idea of what they might expect. The invitations went out as a little packet in brown paper envelopes - I think we both had in mind those Don't Panic envelopes we used to pick up on nights out as students, which were always full of intriguing bits of paper and card. Our packet included the invite itself, the RSVP card to post back and a mysterious line drawing of a decorated plate printed on tracing paper (the owl service itself).

If I've piqued anyone's curiosity, both the book and the original bonkers/unsettling TV series are available. I also just discovered this amazing knitting pattern whilst hunting for my original sources - I know I'll be casting that on as soon as is humanly possible. The folk band aren't bad either!

scan of the original water colour I made for the invite

the finished invitation

original water colour and ink Owl illustration based on The Owl Service

the finished RSVP postcard

The Owl Service plate from Griselda Greaves's drawings

Wedding Stationary: Part I

With the insane tangle of life changing events that 2011 will always be remembered for in our house, planning our wedding was usually the bottom of the heap on the never-ending-list-of-things-to-do (a bit like The Never Ending Story but more stressful and without the cool flying dragons and 80s wardrobe). Probably it was a good thing - it kept the wedding monster inside me in perspective - and meant the process was a happy distraction most of the time. 

However little the time and money there seemed to be, we still wanted to create a handmade moment to start our new lives. It started with "The stationary". I was morally against paying anyone to do it for us. This, if anything, was the moment my creatively obsessed kid-self had been waiting for her entire life. The invitations meant more to me than the dress - I knew I had no hope of making my own dress on any kind of meaningful time scale.

It started with a save the date card. A sketch of our two cats hiding in leaves. In between sending the cards to the printer and their arrival on our doorstop ready to post, we lost cat number one. A horrid tweak of fate that got repeated later in the year. I try not to dwell on that too much in case I jinxed both our kitties by drawing them.

That was the year that was: Killer and Vince

For better or worse our grand scheme of moving to America included carting our kitties with us. Sadly (very, very, very sadly) for us it was not to be. We were (and continue to be) devastated by the sudden death of Killer-Cat and the subsequent rapid fade of Mr Vince. Our home, in any country, feels sad and quiet without the pitter patter of little paws and the sound track of Killer's constant commentary. It was probably for the best that we weren't given time to dwell on it too much last year. We made them a secret part of our wedding - hopefully the kind of secret that will bind us together.

chocolate covered pretzels

We've been living in America for over a month now. It was a slow start, what with not having social security numbers and all that jazz - but we're climbing slowly! We now have WiFi at home, a bank account, an account with the electric company - all the good stuff. We don't have any furniture yet and the apartment is a little sad since the Christmas tree had to go, but it's pay day soon so hopefully a sofa isn't too far away. A course summary of first impressions:

Likes

• maple syrup
• chocolate covered pretzels
• sparrows
• scrapple
• jerky
• ice hockey (go Flyers!)
• the ever changing colours of Philly's skyline (and)
• the view from our apartment
• blood oranges in bulk

Dislikes

• social security numbers
• bonkers licensing laws
• banks
• the lack of supermarket online shopping and home delivery options
• calling the main course an entree
• the price of butter, tea bags and marmite
• our neighbours

Things I miss about home (without mentioning our nearest and dearest)

• rain
• humid air
• the dim slanting light of winter
• the smell of the undergrowth
• furniture
• blackbirds and robins
• our garden (trying not to think about that one too much)
• heating that works
• everything!

a geek moment

Full of the Joys of a new project and faced with a blank, drab and dreary new desk, I made a graphic CMYK codon usage wheel to stick on my wall and brighten the place up a bit. The letters in the middle are the RNA nucleotides: uracil, cytosine, adenine and guanine. Working from the middle out gives you the first, second and third nucleotide in the codon. The letters around the outside are the single letter code for the amino acid that codon encodes. For example: Cyan, Yellow, Cyan = CGC = R = Arginine. 

I was going to make it in a nice tasteful blue configuration, but I was listening to Neon Indian at the time and well.... you see the result!

Click on the image to download and print - offered free to scientists everywhere looking for something jolly for their work environment. Absolutely not to be used for profit of any kind.

New Years Breakfast

Before heading out to our inaugural Philadelphia New Years Day Mummers Parade we needed a hearty breakfast. When we gazed into the cavern of our ginourmas American Fridge we didn't come up with much, but we had the essentials of eggs and bacon (really good smoked Amish bacon too). Eggy bread? Boiled eggs and soldiers? Straight bacon and eggs with toast? When we pulled the bread out it had the beginnings of mould. Dan suggesting cutting off the the mouldy bits. For the purposes of this particular story you should now imagine a light bulb going off over my head....

One of my presents from Santa this year was "North Pole Animal" cookie cutters. Stale bread was now wolves, polar bears, sea lions, whales and penguins.... We'll ignore the fact that the manufacturers of these fine cutters didn't know the basic zoological fact that penguins don't live at the North Pole. The Wolf cutter makes up for that. 

Step 1: Cut our your animals and soak them in beaten egg

Step 2: Fry gently...

... on both sides

Step 3: Serve with a fine dusting of cinnamon, a decent glug of maple syrup, and fried bacon... mmMMMmm

Wedding-ness

Our wedding has been featured on Rock-n-Roll Bride. The incurably curious can click through. We can take credit for the styling (and the knitting - to be blogged at some point), but it was all beautifully captured by our amazing photographer, Laura Babb. I admit we got her for free, but she comes highly recommended from us at any rate!

the long goodbye *

Friday night was date night. We crammed in enough London-centric activities to stem the pre-emptive home sickness. Dinner at the Oriental Canteen; beer in a random pub; ice skating at the Natural History Museum; last orders champers at St Pancras whilst ogling the Lego Christmas tree. Then home, where we sank an entire bottle of left over wedding prosecco and a box champagne truffles whilst watching Merlin on iPlayer. I hope we can figure out iPlayer in Philly, otherwise sanity may start to drift.

* This was an experiment in mobile blogging with Dan's iPhone. I'm sat in bed with my laptop. #fail

for our next trick...

When I commented back in February that "January 2011 was epic, but the rest of 2011 isn't likely to be any different", it wasn't an understatement. That seems like much longer than 260 days ago. Since then we've been battling through a year with even more phenomenal sized waves of peaks and troughs than we'd expected. As John Cage once said to Ally McSqueal "If you think back, and replay your year - if it doesn't bring you tears of joy or sadness, consider the year wasted". This was not a year wasted - there have been plenty of tears of both sorts, not least the good kind on our wedding day. In fact so much happened this year (and is still to happen) that if nothing AT ALL happens next year, we'll be very happy indeed. To summarise crassly and in list format, key life events so far:

four weddings (including our own),

three funerals (including our cats - yes, they got funerals too),

mega flat maintenance (plaster off, walls injected, plaster back on, painted),

grant writing and interviews,

financial tightrope walking,

finding tenants and becoming landlords,

sorting out visas and contracts for the big move to Philly,

a (weekend) trip to the US to find somewhere to live

Somehow in all of this we've managed to stay sane. For my part that might be down the crazy amount of knitting I managed to squeeze in for the wedding. Right now though, we're standing on the edge of the next big adventure*:

Last day of current job, 2nd of December

Flight to US, 9th of December

First day of new job, 12th of December

I have a shed load of faffing about at work to do so I'm ready to leave, but it's all too dull. Hence sitting here, writing guff instead. This space needs to come back into action though. To relive the peaks and troughs of this year and to savour the adventure as it unfolds in the next.

* The lists have been all encompassing and very long this year. The habit is potentially now irreversibly ingrained. If it's not on a list it doesn't happen.