More wedding makes

A belated post, as we are quickly approaching our first anniversary, but, here are a few more of the wedding makes. There are more, including the dress but I think this will suffice for now.

The invites
So this crazy making all started with the invites. We batted around ideas for quite a while but eventually found this picture in the back of a wedding brochure and decided to build are our invites around it.

Somehow we decided that tracing off the design onto acetate and then sticking it onto the invite was the way forward and not being someone to do things the easy way I decided to trace each one individually. This led to a bit of a production line but I was looking for work at the time so it keep me busy!

Tracing the design

Putting the cards together

A close up of the final design

To be honest collecting everyones address was a bigger job, and deciding on our gift list, and it was a very happy day, the day that I took them all to the post office.

The cake
Next we had to start thinking about the cake. We wanted to do a practice so it seemed sensible to do a Christmas cake that we could enjoy. I don't think it had quite struck us how much planning is involved in the cake- you need to make it in time to have at least a month to "feed" it, then you need to marzipan it two weeks before you are going to eat it and ice it a week before you are going to eat it. This means working all of this backwards. We decided to do a test run of the fruit cake as a Christmas cake.

Our test run

The Christmas cake turned out to be a huge success. I took the recipe from 'Cake decorating at home by Zoe Clark'

The recipe book

We had seen this cake while we were in Peru and wanted to base our cake on this with the wonky layers, pattern and bold colours.

Our Inspiration

Maturing cake

The bottom layer

Packaged and ready to go

The cake toppers
I then started to think about cake toppers and saw this brilliant idea on etsy: Penguin wedding cake topper

Cake toppers by fliepsiebieps on Etsy

These were unfortunately a bit too expensive for us so I decided to try and make my own, £7 and a couple of hours later I had our cake toppers!

My head in the development stage!

Ready for the oven

Our cake toppers

And, after some careful packing and driving, here is the finished cake:

The cake :-)

Other handmade items

I will be brief here because we made a lot and you are probably bored already, but, here is a selection of other bits that we made.

Props and signs for the photo booth

Planning the photo booth!

Photo booth in action

Table plan

Buttons on the back of my dress

Lace at the bottom of my dress

Handmade bouquet and shoe flowers

 It is so good to look back at this and think about all the effort that we put in, I hope you enjoy it too.

Love,
Mrs Jones
x
 

 

C&G Pattern cutting

This week has been all about my pattern cutting course.

I had worked out that my 120 hours of teaching would come to an end at the end of July and I thought that I would then have a few weeks before it was examined so I had been aiming for the middle of August and already thought that it would be tight. Turns out that I am being examined on the 21st July- arhhh!

Just to make it even more impossible I had an interview Wednesday and Thursday, worked Friday and was out all day Saturday and Sunday :-s so the past two days I have worked on getting my core 6 pieces completed, and, except for two waistbands which will be this afternoons work, I am there!

My tight-fitting bodice:

Basic bodice- Front

  

Basic bodice- Back

Redesigned bodice- Front

Redesigned bodice- Back

My shirt:

Basic Shirt- Front

Basic shirt- Back

My one-piece dress:

Basic dress- Front

Basic dress- Side

Basic dress- Back

My two-piece dress:

Basic dress- Front

Basic dress- Back

My skirt:

Basic skirt

My trousers (shorts, to save fabric!):

Basic trousers

I needed to get these finished today so that I can overlock all of the edges tonight at college but then I am hoping to be able to work on my folder a bit more as it is looking a bit bare still.

Hopefully I will get some of the folder work uploaded at some point soon.

By the way, I got the job that I wanted and start on Monday :-)

Love,

Mrs Jones
x

Patchwork, Poppies and Painting

OK so I have not been well and been pretty miserable with some rubbish weeks, which is an excuse but a valid one, and the other problem that I have is that I am trying to finish off the "wedding makes" blog post and although I am really proud of everything we made, the wedding seems like such a long time ago and so the enthusiasm just isn't quite there.

In the mean time, I am carrying on with other projects and the blog is missing out on them, so, I will leave the wedding post to simmer and in the mean time try and keep you updated.

A lot of work has been going into my patchwork kit that I got from a friend as a wedding gift. The top is finished. I have bought the wadding and found an old bed sheet in a charity shop to use as the backing and I am currently trying to line all three up without any creases so that I can quilt it. This is really not easy, in fact it is ridiculously difficult and I am panicking about the quilting so I think I will be getting some advice and reading some instructions before I attempt it. Here is the quilt so far:



My first patchwork


Outside of this I have been continuing with my C&G work. I have completed my basic two-piece dress:




Basic two-piece dress

 and, am looking forward to making it into my own style. I dug out some fabric today but it didn't look how I thought it did so I may be heading back to the fabric shop!

I have also been working on my bodice, shirt and one piece dress too so watch this space.

On a design front I found a few blogs today that showed people's sketchbooks from their C&G and it really inspired me to get going again. Here are a couple that really impressed me:
http://lizbenjeddi.blogspot.co.uk/
http://madebymelanie-cityandguilds.blogspot.co.uk/

I created my mood board the other day and it is full of poppies and polka dots. I started with Mr Jones' fantastic poppy picture:



Poppies in Norfolk


Then drew out a poppy onto some solufleece, attached it to some denim and embroidered over it:



Embroidered poppy

 I am really pleased with the results. Then the rain came so instead of going out I decided to do a bit of painting. I started with the end of a pencil (the rubber end) and moved onto some bubble wrap to produce these prints:




Using the end of a pencil




Printing using bubble wrap




Still bubble wrap but adding centres for the look of poppies

 Hopefully there will be more to follow shortly although I am off Norfolk for the weekend (which is where the poppy picture was taken!).

Love,

Mrs Jones