wedding cake

wedding cake, originally uploaded by the pig wot flies.

This was a joint effort. The bottom tier is fruit cake made (in a bucket) by my mum and Hannah's now husband Steve. The upper tiers are chocolate (made to this recipe) made by me and my mum (the top layer was gluten-free for my dad and grandma). We covered the cakes with ready made icing and added lime green polka dots and brown ribbon.

The finished cake was very heavy and tricky to transport, but we did it. (Well, my mum and dad did). It looked good and tasted pretty good too.

bridesmaids' dresses

bridesmaid, originally uploaded by the pig wot flies.

Rather a lot of the past 6 weeks has been spent making bridesmaids' dresses. With a chocolate brown and lime green theme, it was the easiest way to get four dresses which (semi) matched. This is mine, which I spent most of the day hoiking up. Oops. Not as well fitted on the bust as it could have been.

The pattern is Vogue 7848. The fabric is (scarily expensive, but rather lovely) silk satin from Borovick's. I don't have pictures of all four of us, but here's Anna, along with my gorgeous sister Hannah.



My other sister Debs is 33 weeks pregnant, so she needed a different style of dress. This isn't the best angle, but you can see the empire line and straps of her dress (Burda 7630).



The silk was a little intimidating to cut and sew, but with some patience, fine pins and lots of tissue paper, I got the hang of it. It felt gorgeous to wear and looks pretty good in the photos I've seen. Debs felt a bit too hot, but I think she'd have been too hot whatever she wore. The silk sashes tended to slip very easily, of course. I'm pleased with my work, though it has put me off the idea of making bridesmaids' dresses for my own wedding. I want to make my own dress and I think I'm going to have enough on my plate without adding 4 more. Though maybe I'll make a dress for the smallest bridesmaid...

What I've been up to

pom poms!, originally uploaded by the pig wot flies.

For the last few months, I have been mostly making these. My sister got married yesterday in a lime green and brown pom pom strewn wedding. We made a few hundred pom poms in different sizes to be used as decorations and thrown as confetti.

The inspiration came from this wedding blog - How engaging! - and this gorgeous post in particular. Way back when HP got engaged and started thinking about wedding colour schemes, she liked the idea of using chocolate brown and maybe lime green, but wasn't totally sure. I think showing her that blog helped her decide that it could work and was definitely a big influence on the final scheme. I'm going to blog some of the other things we made for the wedding, but if you can't wait, click through for some tasters on flickr.