Curious Clare's Handmade Wedding - Part Two

So far this year, Hyperemesis Gravidarum and anaemia have brought normal blogging service grinding to a halt. However, I am feeling slightly more human these days and to celebrate here is a post on our wedding as featured in Handmade Wedding magazine (pages 86-91). The article is written really well and sums up the spirit of our wedding beautifully.

In short, our wedding was a colourful, handmade family affair from the wedding dress and cake to the laser cut invitations, paper pompoms and laser cut birdy bunting. We hired a heritage red London double decker bus to transport the guests (and ourselves) to and from the venue to create an informal, relaxed atmosphere before the ceremony started. The theme was birds and buses - buses to fit in with the transport and birds to reflect my passion for them. I designed, laser cut and hand foiled invitations shaped like buses with a robin riding on the top deck. My son was given the role of bus conductor, collecting the individual tickets that I had made for everyone. The colour theme was hot pink and turquoise, a real feast for the eyes on a rainy day in south Manchester!

My family's creativity ran throughout the wedding - my mum made my tea length baby blue wedding dress out of duchesse satin and lace, we based it on an elegant 1950's Vogue pattern, my grandma made the sugar paste flowers to sit on top of my sister's cupcakes, an old family friend made the bridesmaids dresses and I even trained up my husband (and son) in the art of origami so that he could help make 180 paper flowers for the tables. It had the look of an old fashioned but vibrant English summer fete by the time we had finished complete with hog roast and local English ales.

Tips for other brides-to-be looking to add handmade details to their big day.

Handmade elements really personalised the wedding and ensured that we could have exactly what we wanted. I would thoroughly recommend adding your own touches to the day.

Do gather lots of ideas together from wedding magazines and online sources such as Pinterest (elements of our wedding can be seen here)

Do keep a tight control on the budget, handmade is not necessarily a cheap option

Do involve family members with making details for the wedding. My husband was brilliant at making the origami flowers!

Don’t be afraid to ask family and friends to help out otherwise you will become overwhelmed with the prospect of decorating a whole venue yourself!

Don’t forget to have fun! As the wedding day approaches enjoy the making and planning.

Photographs were taken by the talented Kelly Clarke of Imagesplash.

Goodbye Baby Chip

A personal account of a miscarriage that I have written to help me come to terms with my loss and also to act as a record of a fleeting life.
On Friday 26^th April, we discovered that I was five weeks pregnant. We were overjoyed and a little awed at the prospect of welcoming a new member into our little family. All the signs over the next few weeks were of a normal healthy pregnancy and it was becoming increasingly tricky to disguise my growing bump. Little did we know that seven weeks later I would start to miscarry when a scan revealed that the baby did not have a heartbeat. I always knew that a miscarriage was a terrible experience but I had no idea that it would be so painful, prolonged and frightening or end in emergency surgery after two failed attempts at medical management.

Whilst recovering back at home, I struggled to come to terms with the loss. Not only was I in physical pain but I also felt bereft and heartbroken. As the time passed I knew that I needed something tangible to mark the event and acknowledge a life that was never meant to last for long. I began to think about western ways of dealing with death but none of them seemed to be appropriate. Then I remembered the ceremonies that I have witnessed in Japan and Hong Kong. I have always felt an affinity with Buddhist teachings and found their religious ceremonies and temples to be calming.  I realise that religion is not to be dipped in and out of but I really needed a way of acknowledging the fact that I would never get to hold or meet my lost baby.

These thoughts led me to think about the use of paper votives, street shrines (which I have posted about before) and Jizo statues. I first came across Jizo statues in temples and at roadsides when I lived in Japan. I was intrigued to know why certain small statues were adorned with hats and bibs. I later learnt from my Japanese friends that they were used to represent the souls of dead children.

Jizo Statues photo by Al McDermid

Jizo is a Bodhisattva who looks after women, children (including the souls of unborn children) and travellers. Jizo statues are a physical marker of a loss of a child and a protector. They are used in Mizuko Kuyo, which is a Japanese ceremony held in Buddhist temples for those who have had a miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. Mizuko beautifully translates as "water child” which for me seems a really fitting description of a lost baby. 

After thinking about these traditions, I decided that I wanted to create a paper offering that could be released as a simple farewell. I settled on the idea of an origami boat which would be set free by the action of it floating down a gentle stream at Dunham Massey, one of our favourite places. I printed off my favourite wedding photo (that has myself, my husband and son on it) and wrote a letter to baby Chip from all of us before folding it up into a paper boat. I later added 4x sails to symbolise each one of us, with the largest sail representing baby Chip. We floated the boat away the other evening and as time is passing I feel physically better and now hope that the act of saying goodbye will help my emotional healing.

Goodbye baby Chip.