Wedding: Knitting I

Having introduced our lovely photographer I get to finally blog all the knitting I did for our wedding. Woop! When we wrote the first draft of the words for the RocknRoll Bride submission I included far too much knitting information - why I chose the yarn, what the patterns were etc etc. It took a few gentle hints from Dan to make me realise no one but knitters likes that stuff. Now I will indulge myself in all the knitting goodness, because the knitting part of the wedding and knitting in general is important to me for lots of reasons. Firstly, it calms and relaxes me - the repetitive motions are very soothing (I won't dwell too much on what that means for my autistic spectrum tendencies). Secondly, it's a creative release and I've always loved making things. Finally, there's a big emotional factor too.

I love knitting for the people in my life. You've thought about that person for every stitch you've made. I know I'm supposed to be a scientist, but when I hand over something like that - where I've thought about and loved that person for thousands of stitches - I feel like the knitting carries the love and somehow that person should be kept safer for having the knitted thing. The wedding needed knitting, because it needed to be loved. There's no logic in that, but weddings in general aren't logical.

Photo by Laura Babb

The first bit of knitting was my gloves (rav link). The pattern is Ysolda's Veyla. As soon as we booked a November wedding I wanted gloves, and Veyla is so pretty and refined it wasn't even a decision. I knitted most of them during our stay at Balnakiel in April 2011, with wool I'd already stashed carefully away for something special. Dan bought me the wool - Hebridean 2 ply in Pebble Beach - not long after this post by knitting idol Kate Davies was published, extolling the virtues of Alice Starmore's colours. Pebble Beach is as beautiful in person as Kate made it sound and the wool spent a long time in pride of place on the stash shelves, ready to be fondled and gazed at as I walked past it. This moment was also the time I became slightly obsessed by grey as a colour. Because I love colour and grey seemed to have the ability to be all colours at once and yet shift and change through many different shades through the course of a day. I wanted a grey wedding dress. Close friends looked horrified when I told them this. I made those gloves long before I had an idea what my dress would be like, because if the dress didn't go with the gloves, I didn't want it.

Photo by Laura Babb