Monday, 28 January 2013
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Kinderdijk
Last weekend, together with a few of my colleagues and a group of 70 students, we braved the absolutely freezing weather conditions to go and visit Kinderdijk, a beautiful Unesco protected area with nineteen magnificent windmills.
Most of my students arrived in the Netherlands from Australia just a few weeks ago, and the weather difference between what they left behind and what they've been faced with over here in the last few days/weeks couldn't really be any more extreme. A few of them actually came to me, while we were walking from one windmill to another, with a worried look on their face to let me know that they believed they might loose a toe or two to the cold or at least get serious frost bite. I smiled, thinking it was a silly joke, but quickly realised no one was laughing. They were genuinely worried. And so we snapped a few photos very quickly and hopped inside the visitors' center to go and watch a video about it all in a slightly warmer environment!
P.S. I still have one or two wedding posts to show you. Soon!
Monday, 21 January 2013
Thursday, 17 January 2013
Monday, 14 January 2013
Friday, 11 January 2013
our wedding | super simple white and pastel garlands
I couldn't have imagined my wedding without some garlands somewhere. They're such a simple and pretty way of making a place feel festive!
Mart and I, together with my brother and his girlfriend, punched thousands and thousands of circles out of white and pastel coloured paper and sewed them together with a sewing machine. The day before the wedding, my brother hung it all in the gallery where our wedding took place, together with several strands of fairy lights.
It looked just like I hoped it would!
Thursday, 10 January 2013
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
our wedding | getting ready
One of the reasons we fell in love with Western Australia is the amazing sunsets that one can marvel at daily. Or almost as we found out on our wedding day. :-)
But let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?
The night before our wedding, when we were preparing the art gallery for the ceremony and the reception afterwards, we all took a short break to go and admire the sky slowly changing into beautiful shades of orange and pink...
I had just assumed we'd experience something exactly like that the next evening, with all our guests... but the weather had something different in store for us!
We did get to watch many sunsets during the rest of our time there though, so it's all ok.
Now, on to the actual wedding day!
Here are a few snapshots of us getting ready...
Photo credits | all photos by Claire Dalgliesh
Tuesday, 8 January 2013
our wedding | colourful wooden cutlery
During a few (very) warm days last summer we painted some 400 wooden spoons, forks and knifes with pretty pastel colours in anticipation for our wedding.
We also made little pouches that we printed with our names to hold the cutlery and napkins (using the same stamp as here). It worked great with the personalised fish & chip bags!
Photo credits | 8 & 9: Claire DalglieshMonday, 7 January 2013
Friday, 4 January 2013
our wedding | homemade cake
It is the tradition in my family for my grand-mother to make the wedding cakes; she's made the ones for all her children and grand-children's weddings so far. I was so happy she could make ours too, even though our wedding was on the other side of the planet!
The cake was a traditional British fruit cake, and it was delicious.
For the decoration I was very much inspired by this picture (via). I made the little hearts out of fondant which I folded in half and let dry on an angle... and my mum and my aunty were extremely patient in placing them all on the finished cake. At that point I was so busy running around the place semi frantically, trying to think of everything we needed to finalise before the wedding, that I would certainly have made a complete mess. :-)
It is also the tradition to keep the top part of the cake and eat it at the birth of your first child... I'll keep you posted! hehehe...
Photo credits | 1 & 2: Mathieu Collioud | 3,4 & 5: Claire Dalgliesh
Thursday, 3 January 2013
our wedding | flowers
I am ever so lucky to have two aunties who are really good with flowers and who agreed to take on the daunting task of making all the bouquets, button-holes and flower decorations for our wedding. They did such an amazing job; it was exactly what I had dreamed of!
Mart's mum, together with several of her friends, had been saving glass jars and bottles for months, carefully soaking them to take the labels off and cleaning them out. I then spent a few afternoons before the wedding on the back balcony applying several layers of white spray-paint on all of them. They made great vases for the flowers.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
our wedding | personalised fish & chip bags
Once our wedding invitations had been printed, I cut the printing plate and made parts of it into two stamps we could use for our special day.
One of the ways we used them was to personalise the bags which wrapped the fish & chips we served at dinner. I used waterproof ink and simply stamped each bag with our names and the date.
Photo credits | 5 & 6: Claire Dalgliesh
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