Paper Anniversary

I love you Mr Sunshine ... last year you made me the happiest woman alive ... and you keep doing so on a regular basis ... lets go build some sofa forts! ;)

Hello 2010

So here we are again at the start of a brand new year; a brand new decade ... Sunshine and I have had quite the busy year in 2009 - mostly, we got married; which seemed to take up most of the year. Over Christmas we got married again ... well, not really again, but had a another celebration for it in my home country of Bangladesh (see photo above). We came back just before New Years, and have spent the last few days just trying to get back into the swing of things, here in sunny but very cold Bristol. Sunshine's family also grew a bit more - he became an uncle :) Welcome to the world our newest little friend ...

This next year will also be quite full-on - mostly because I finish and graduate in June/July (eeep!) and can officially call myself a trained illustrator... will be scary, but am looking forward to it. Also have lots of other plans ... but we'll talk about those as we come to them...

Happy 2010! Wishing you a year full of peace, happiness, success and joy!!!

Wedding Wednesday - part 9

Thank you everyone who came and made it such a lovely day ... 5 months in (yes, a bit late ... ), but we got there!

Making process here.

Thank you Adana

Phew! What a steep learning curve this has been ... Regular readers will remember that we procured an Adana 8x5 not too long ago; but then promtly stopped blogging about it. Well, we have actually been using it, but its been a lot of trial and error over several days. And with college and life, those days have been non-concurrent.

But I am pleased to say now that I think we have it (mostly) down, and have done our first two print runs (they are of the same thing - our wedding thank you cards - we just ran out of cards and had to go and buy a second box of supplies). Anyways, here's a kind of 'photo story' of the process. It's made up of photos from a couple of goes - so there isn't necessarily continuity in what's going on. Here goes... :

We start with my original design - then traced into the two separate colours (at the end I ended up re-drawing the whole thing as one piece and scanned it into Photoshop, and did the separating into two layers that way - and printed the two layers out separately).

Next, printed the layers out on acetate - in negative (for making photopolymer flexoplates).

I'm lucky that in my college they have the fascilities for making photopolymer flexoplates - it's a bit like making a silkscreen screen. There is a thin steel plate with some photoemulsion on it. You place the negative acetate the wrong way round on the emulsion and then expose it to UV light. The exposed bits harden (what you're going to print with), and you wash away the unhardened bits. Here are my two plates for the two colour separations.

Imagine then I've mounted the plates on wood to get them 'type height' and used some quoins and furniture to clamp them in place in the chase. I got some of this fab Caligo Safe Wash ink - and here is me inking the ink disk.

Even before we could print we noticed that the plate was inking up too much. This was not going to do ...

Not only was it over-inking, it was not sticking properly to the wood base. We fiddled with this for LONG time... We tweeked the impression screws; we tried to lift the rollers by putting layers of tape on the edge of the roller bearer (the thing the chase sits in); and all sorts ...

To cut a long story short, Sunshine eventually took the whole thing apart, cut the plates down so the edges were closer to the printing bits, and remounted them on wood that he had put through a special machine that would sand it down to the exact height. We made sure the plates were stuck down well, and we even had to hammer down some of the corners that kept getting inked.

Eventually though we finally managed to get it all working ... first print run we did this plate (with the rings) first - then the one with the figures. The second print run the following week we did the other way round as can be seen here:

I'm not entirely sure why I'm speaking like a child o_O ... also, when changing between the two plates, I did the old screenprint registration trick of taping down some acetate to print on, and then putting a card with the first colour on, underneath the printed acetate to align it properly. The Adana has an adjustable 'lay gauge' that holds the bottom of the card where you want it, and we used a piece of thick acetate to mark off one of the edges. You can see me pushing the card up against it in the video.

Final card to be unveiled on Wedding Wednesday tomorrow ;)

Wedding Wednesday - part 8

Wedding Wednesday comes back with a special announcement - the official (as official as we can get) set of photos are up! We had to sift through several thousand shots from our awesome 'official' photograper, and also all the lovely CDs we received from friends and family - and here you have the best of the best (click on the image to take you to the flickr collection).


Also, our wedding has been featured (and very nicely put together too!) at Aussie wedding magazine/blog Style Collective (click on banner to go straight to the site). Thank you Amanda!


Last but not least - progress has been made on our handprinted thank you cards - yes, we are very VERY late ... but that's because I wanted to make something by hand. Flexoplates and Adanas came into the equation ;) ... If it all gets sorted, that will be a big Wedding Wednesday post next week ...

Wedding Wednesday - hiatus

"The Wedding Posse"

There is not much left of the wedding posts - just a couple of little things to tie up that I'd like to talk about. But for the meantime, Wedding Wednesday is going to be on hiatus as Term has started - and as this is the beginning of the end, (final year! EeEEEEeeepppPPp!), I'm going to be prioritisisng my illustration degree.

Sunshine is busy trying to get the 'official' photos edited and cleaned up, so will post here when those are up on flickr ... but while I have the chance, would just like to say a HUGE thank you to the bridal party + other halves + one hanger on; otherwise known as the "Wedding Posse"; for all their help and support on and around the day ... we love you!

Wedding Wednesday - part 7

Today's topic ... entertainment! (other wedding related posts here)

Sunshine and I lead fairly active lives - infact we met swing dancing, via a mutual swing dancing/juggling friend who Sunshine had met through juggling. And as such, we had to do very little in the way of organising "entertaiment" for our guests - as they were all so entertaining themselves!

Our friends performed for us (clockwise from top left: Pich did his stick routine, Ed did a hillarious pizza twirling routine to "That's Amore", and Cookie sang for us.

There was a lot of juggling/manipulation gear about - and a lot of hoolahoops! As seen here enjoyed by both young and old ;) (please do click on the images to see them larger - especially little Manon who was just a gem of a guest!)

As we had met dancing - we had our first dance to a swing version of "Sunny" by Ernestine Anderson. (Sunshine - Sunny ... you get it, yes?)

DJ-ed by some of the best swing DJs in the country (who also happen to be our friends ... how lucky are we??!!??) ... thank you Daniel, Tom, David, Mel and Mark ...

Much dancing ensued till late under the marquee ...

Whilst in the garden, much multicoloured spinning could be seen.

The dancers were all trying to hoop and juggle, and the jugglers all wanted to dance. The non-dancer/jugglers also all joined in the festivities ... it was GRAND! So many of the parents generation kept coming to us an commenting what talented friends we have ... and indeed we do ;)

In other news, the wedding has been blogged about again - I have updated my Thank You post with the link ;)

Thank you ...

The wedding posts have been really well received over the blogosphere - and I thought I'd say a little Thank You to all the lovely posters - and Welcome to everyone who is new to planetmithi! ... Click on the banner images to go straight to the article :)

Wedding Wednesday - part 6

Today ... my favourite wedding project: The corsages ... (other wedding related posts here)

Ours, and wearing them during our first dance :)

Rather than make boutonnieres, which just didn't appeal to me, I handmade little photo corsage/ribbon/brooch/award things for all the wedding party and immediate family. Unfortunately in the rush to finish them, I didn't document me making them, or the final brooches before I gave them out. The photos here are from after the wedding - and I've tried my best to include pictures of their wearers too - also found this difficult and am missing a few ... oooooh wellllll ...

The parents...

My sister...

Sunshine's sister and brother-in-law

The bestman ...

The man-of-honour...

My grandma (left) and the bridesman (right)

The missing photos are Nic, the bestlady, who had one similar to my sister's in shades of orange; and my aunt (mum's sister) whose birthday it was that day and who got one similar to the mums' but in shades of green.

The photo frames are little dollhouse frames that I spray-painted white. The whole thing is stuck/sewn to a backing piece of felt onto which I attached a safety pin. Fairly straight forward you would think - but it took a long time: sourcing the right colours and combinations of ribbons; doing all the sewing - especially sewing all the names on; sourcing all the photographs; and just in general putting it all together. The family photos are of us when we were young with the respective family member; and the ones with the "best posse" were again one of us with the respective wearer. I am SO happy with these. I am going to frame up Sunshine and mine's with the peg-doll cake-toppers that Sunshine's sister made for us, with a few other wedding bits and bobs into a shadow box. My mum wants to frame our family ones too ... really glad I took the time do this ... and so enjoyed it too :)

Wedding Wednesday - part 5

Guestbook and Hellos ...(other wedding related posts here)

So these were the two projects that didn't quite go to plan - but turned out great anyways ... firstly, the wedding photo-guestbook.

*Above: Our friends who got married 6 weeks after us :)

Hugely inspired by all the photo-guestbooks on pretty much every wedding related website/blog that's out there. We set out to make our own. Sunshine, his dad, and the man-of-honour got together and via some trial and error fashioned a frame from bamboo poles taped together and stuck into two concrete pots that usually hold garden umbrellas. The large piece of floral fabric was originally bought as possible bunting fabric. I also made up a little chalkboard speech bubble using some thin plywood cut to shape; then painted with chalkboard paint on both sides. Add to that some chunky chalk; and a picnic basket full of random hats, leis, feather boas and other props; and there you have a great photo-guestbook set up. We got the bestman's digital camera set up on a tripod, and set it to auto ... and left the whole set-up in the garden ...

All our hopes of people spending time in the garden were unfortunately thwarted as it was quite a gray day, and most people spent most of their time in the marquee - this meant that not a lot of people discovered the photobooth (although we did try to get the word out), and so we only have about 30 pictures ... BUT they are some of the fabbest pictures of the wedding yet! See the full set of photos here.

The other thing I did was make up lots of "Hello, my name is..." tags for everyone. Sunshine and I know lots of lovely people, but they don't all necessarily know each other. I had hoped to make these up; written guests' names on myself; and maybe added a bit of "... ask me about ___" as a conversation starter; and added their table assignment on the back. But due to the last minute-ness of lots of things ... that never happened. Still, I didn't want them to be wasted - so I left a basket full of them with a sharpie by the entrance to the marquee. And not surprisingly, people found them and wrote their names on! Some did a more than just write their names though ;)

I didn't like the standard stickers you could buy, so made them up smaller and in a font that I liked and printed out sheets of them. I also bought packs of rectangular badges which I stuck to the back of my printouts with some spray adhesive. Then it was quite easy to cut individual badges out.

By the way, Burning Dan was our official photographer - he's not a wedding photographer, but he's a friend who's very good at getting reactions out of people, and we have some stunning shots of the wedding guests from him (that we are still working through ...) - that will be another future post ...

Next week - my favourite craft project of the wedding!

Wedding Wednesday - part 4

Cakes! ... (other wedding related posts here)


Neither Sunshine nor I are big fans of wedding cake - especially the traditional fruit cake and marzipan sort. Most weddings I've been to I've found the cake was the 'least eaten' thing ... So instead, we did what Sunshine's sister had done at her wedding - asked our friends to bring us a cake in lieu of a wedding present! And MAN did we have cake!

As you can see, we had at least 15 different cakes, including gluten-free ones and even a vegan one. I had been collecting vintage cake stands for the last year or so, so lay them out on a long table, simply decorated in the front with some coloured paper doilies on string. I also made each cake a little label-on-a-stick. Very easy, just printed the names out on some coloured card, then cut round in a vaguely oval shape with my scallop-edged craft scissors. The sticks are those little stirrers you get in coffee shops.

At the end we picked one of the lovely cakes (made by Lynn and Jon, which had incidentally been assembled that morning at a camp site!) and stuck in a couple of peg doll cake toppers that my new sister-in-law Lucy had made especially (she even made them to look like us - aren't they just lovely!?!).

We also laid out some boiled sweets and my mum/sis/aunt made a stack of little cupcakes (haven't got good photos of those) and also you can just about see on some of the cake photos, Sunshine's parents brought us some lovely nutty petit-four kind of things from Dubai. And I have to say, it all went down a treat.... The table of cakes lay untouched - till after we had had dinner, and after we had cut our cake - and then it was like a swarm attacking the table! There was hardly anything left at the end of the night :) ...

So there you have it, our wedding sweeties ... more stuff to come next week ...

Wedding Wednesday - part 3

More wedding details ... table settings! ... (parts 1 & 2, and other wedding related posts)

So this is what the table settings looked like. A centerpiece of a vintage jug filled with flowers; a milk bottle table number; and a jam jar filled with some battery operated fairy-lights. Also, at each place setting, a hand made place card.

The flowers: As we were having the wedding in a gorgeous country garden, we didn't want professional expensive flower arrangements - we wanted it to feel like you'd picked some flowers for your kitchen table (also, helped with cost!). Sourcing the flowers (as I was doing this myself rather than through a florist) became quite a chore ... won't go into the details but suffice to say, best man Dom was a life-saver ... I spent the Thursday night before the wedding, (after having had a large family dinner), in the best man's garden with one of those caving head lights strapped to my forehead; equipped with a pair of garden shears, and some buckets; cutting hydrangeas and crocosmias till almost midnight. Earlier that day I had bought out all of the Broadmead Marks and Spencer's stock of gerberas and larkspurs in the wedding colours.

We transported the lot to the venue on Friday in buckets and set my lovely mum on the job of flower arranging. Remember the vintage jugs I had been collecting over the last 6 months? Well my mum then sat down with all the flowers and jugs (and lovely helper Nic) and made up some smashing centerpieces ... Thank you Ammu! For some strange reason though, mum seems to have disappeared in the photo - that's my Aunt in the pink fleece ...

I also bought a stack of florists' cellophane flower bags and printed out some translucent sticky labels to stick on them. Towards the end of the wedding evening I sent my sister and some willing helpers off to take the centerpieces and pack them up in the the cello bags as wedding favours for whoever wanted them!

Table numbers: I had in my mind that I wanted to use some old milk bottles for something - but not sure what; or where I was going to find them. Then one day earlier in the year, I saw my neighbour disposing of a whole box of them. I ran over and asked if I could have them and he said "Sure!" ... wondering why on earth I was so excited about some dirty milk bottles ;)

I then found a font I liked (it's the same font as on the "Wedding" sign that I painted); opened it in Adobe Illustrator; got it to the right size; and vectorised it. Then sent that file off with Sunshine as they have a vinyl cutter at his work. I had both some red and some white sticky-backed vinyl cut as the combination worked much better than each colour individually. Then it was matter of cleaning and drying the bottles and carefully sticking down my vinyl so it was all aligned nicely. (Edit: someone asked me where I got my vinyl from - the answer? Scrapstore!)

I still had lots of wedding invites left so got my helpers to make up a few more Tweeters which then got stuck on some barbecue sticks and plopped into each bottle. Ah! A photo of my mum ... from the top left, anti-clockwise, my sis, my grandma, and mum! (there was a lot more birdie helpers - this is only the ones whose photos I have).

Place Cards: This again was an idea that evolved over time ... I had initially found the vintage Garden Plants book in a charity shop for 20p(!). With the wedding being in a flower garden, I knew I wanted to use it for the wedding - but not sure how ... Eventually they ended up as place cards! You can pretty much see how I sliced the pages and folded them up to make little stand up flowers (I didn't have enough to cover all the guests so had to make a few colour photocopies too).

I then used a craft punch to cut out the red circles on which I wrote the guest's name with a white pen. I also did a few cards with yellow butterflies (another craft punch) to make sure the caterers knew who had special gluten-free diets (and a purple butterfly for our one and only garlic-free guest).

Last but not least Fairy lights: We didn't manage to get any photos of me making them, but let me describe it (you can see them on the top photo). I sourced some battery operated LED fairy-lights that would fit inside jam jars that I had been collecting for years (I always have a stash for all sorts of use). Then cut out some fabric circles to fit over the lids and glued them down with some PVA to look like homemade jam jars. As it was getting dark, we went round the wedding marque to each table; popped the lids open; switched the fairy-lights on and popped the lids back on ... for some twinkles into the evening :)

There you go ... next week - cake!