The Common Law Marriage Myth

While we were at the Registration Office giving notice of marriage the other day, A Man spotted this postcard in a display:

Postcard published by Advice Services Alliance. Image from advicenow.org.uk.

A Touch of Blue

On Saturday evening, A Man and I went to F and N’s wedding reception.  It was a great fun evening with a lot of entertainment for the guests and the dress code of “A touch of blue”.  I just thought I’d share a few photos from the evening.

As promised, a photo of the cake on the cake stand I helped to decorate.

I hereby give notice…

Yesterday, A Man and I gave notice of marriage at the Registration Office in Chippenham.  This is one of the legal steps to take if you’re planning a civil marriage ceremony in England or Wales and a similar process exists if you’d like to have a civil partnership.

Your notice of intent to marry has to be publicly displayed for 15 days before the certificate is issued and it is valid for a year after notice has been given.  It cost us £35 each to give notice.  Of course, the Registry Office is only open during office hours, so A Man had to take a couple of hours off.  Luckily, he managed to arrange an appointment for us before I started the new job, so we could go in together.

Making a (cake) stand

F (one of A Man’s former colleagues) is getting married this Saturday to N.  Having discovered that I can knit (guess who told her!) she asked if I could knit up some small flowers in a range of blues for her.  After having little success with the patterns I found on the web, I ended up creating some of my own which turned out rather more successfully!  It came at a fairly good time as I’m currently in limbo between having finished my postgraduate course, left the supermarket and not yet started my ‘real’ job.

Knowing that I love all things weddingy, F invited me over to decorate her cake stand (which was the reason she had asked for the knitted flowers).  There’s not a huge amount to write about it, so I’ll let the photos do the talking (all photos are personal, apologies in advance for the poor quality…).

We started by wrapping some ribbon around the stand’s uprights and putting a very important plate of chocolate biccies on the middle tier!

Impulse Buys

Yesterday, I took an early morning trip to Southampton for some serious retail therapy.  I was partially intending to buy some new clothes for work (which I succeeded in doing – hurrah!) and partially intending to go to Ikea for a few bits.  No trip to Ikea has ever resulted in only buying ‘a few bits’.  There was one evening I went up to Bristol with my dad to buy a cabinet and it consisted of driving up, buying the cabinet and going home; but even then he still bought himself a coffee and me an ice cream and in any case, it had followed a previous trip that week when they hadn’t had it stock, so really it was part of that previous trip.

Anyway, it’s become something of a joke between me and my parents that any Ikea trip always has to include at least one impulse buy.  Yesterday, a lot was bought on impulse, and I ended up spending rather more than intended.

One of those purchases was what I like to term “legitimate wedding expenditure” – a total of 72 floating candles.

Ikea FENOMEN floating candles. Image from ikea.com.

Tiddly Om Pom Pom

My adventures with origami continue.  I wrote about my previous attempt to create a cherry blossom pomander and my dissatisfaction with it.  I left it for a few days to have a think.

One evening, I had a brainwave.  There was no particular reason to use all the same style of flowers.  I had inspiration in the unlikely source of the pentagons and hexagons on a football.

Image Source.

Apologies for the mathematical content of this post.  Much as it may be appropriate for my and A Man’s relationship, I promise there will be some pretty photos if you can stick it through to the end!

Dream a little dream of me…

Last night I had a dream about the wedding.  It resulted in my waking up, desperately needing a glass of water and not being able to go back to sleep for ages.  Want to know what it was about?

Things going wrong.

It’s crazy to be having anxiety dreams with 9 months left until crunch time, but there we have it.  In my dream, I woke up in my bed at my parents’ house, with A Man.  This wouldn’t be a disaster, but I do envisage us spending the night before the wedding apart, primarily because I imagine that his mum would like to spend some time with him!  I also didn’t realise it was the wedding day, and there were a huge number of things which hadn’t been organised.

Eye’ve been thinking

I started uni in October of 2008.  I would spend entire days cooped up in my teeny tiny little bedroom, pushing myself to read through my textbook and pages and pages of legal cases.  One of the wonders of the 21st century means that much of the case-reading could be done via the internet.  I therefore spent a large percentage of my day staring at a computer screen.

I started to notice that I was finding it difficult to read slides during lectures, and that it was giving me a headache to concentrate on what was being written.  This is how, in December of 2008, I discovered that I had managed to make myself short sighted.

A Man and I pose in front of the canal in Amsterdam in March. Personal photo.

Paper Pomanders

I’ve already discussed my intention to have origami flowers at the wedding, and spoke ages ago about the fact that I will have two very cute flower girls.  Now, I’m not sure whether our venue permits petals to be scattered by small children, but in any case that’s not really my style.  Instead, I’ve been inspired by pictures like these to give our flower girls pomanders to hold.

Images from marthastewartweddings.com; jenandtedwed.tumblr.com; thedemoiselle.com.