Goodbye Durham

This is my second farewell blog post of the week (for my work one follow this link).

Today was my last day living in Durham and the sun was shining which makes the city look beautiful so it was a good day to have off work to enjoy wandering around the cobbled street, listening to buskers and bumping into friends.

Unfortunately I forgot to take my camera into town but I did get some snaps of the rest of the day. This is how I spent my last day in Durham:

          A delicious summer lunch with birthday chutney eaten in the sunshine          

Packing up all my remaining possessions ready to be shipped down south

Re-potting lavender plants on the patio

Watering the seedlings on my windowsill that my house mates are going to babysit for me

Making home-baked cookies as a goodbye present

Goodbye Durham! I will miss you and your inhabitants but I will be back to visit often and friends are always welcome in London.

a beautiful little girl

I've had my 50mm lens for a few weeks now and since getting it I've been doing a little flurry of portrait photography. I think it helps that compared to my other lens (28-135mm) this one is positively dinky and so it's much less awkward pointing it in people's faces! Although I think when you're the age of this little girl then you probably don't mind too much either way.

These photos were taken last weekend when my fiancé and I travelled just outside Durham to visit his sister and family. Last time we got to see them his niece was just a week old so it's been great getting to know her a bit more now she's smiling and interacting with people more.

 Baby photography is a completely new thing for me but it is a real privilege to be able to capture some special family moments and I really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to seeing our little niece grow up and I can promise to do my duty as a doting aunty and take many more photos to come as she gets older...

this is to invite you to....

I mentioned in a previous blog that I've been spending a lot of my spare time planning a wedding and here is a chance to see some of what I've been up to!

Seeing as we've now given out all our invites there doesn't seem to be any need to keep it a secret any more!

I was inspired by browsing other wedding invites on Pinterest but we wanted to have something that was still unique to us.

Jonny (my fiance) and I came up with design ideas together which included a hand-drawn tree, map and swirly branches.

The tree on the invitation section is based on a necklace that Jonny gave me when he proposed and the leaves were painstakingly coloured in by hand to have a more authentic gold look that was tricky to achieve with a printer!

The fabric used to tie up the invites is the same material my mum and aunt are using to make our ushers' waistcoats. And the green colour is a fairly close match to the material of the bridesmaid's dresses.

The ivory and walnut coloured card came from a great company I discovered called Eco Craft who produce high quality recycled card and paper. And we also got our labels and envelopes from them too!

Putting the invites together was definitely a team effort and at one point Jonny, me, my two brothers, my mum and my cousin Sorren were all involved in cutting fabric, tying bows, filling in John Lewis cards, colouring in leaves, writing envelopes etc! 

 

My brother Simon refused to look at any design ideas because he wanted the final result to be a surprise! So he was the first to receive an invite meaning we could then get him to help us make the rest!

A venture into portrait photography...

It was my birthday last weekend and very excitingly I got a new camera lens for my Canon 450D! I got my camera about three years ago and have been working with the 28-135mm lens ever since so it's great to be able to add a bit of variety with a lovely 50mm portrait one. 

As you can see I wasted no time in asking my friends to pose for me:

As you can see it's such a lovely lens to use for portraits and I'm looking forward to getting more into 'people' photography.

Here's a final pic to make you smile. It's my friend Tom with a fish piñata on his head:

blogging again

I know that it's been very quiet on the old blog front for a while and I'm sorry not to have been around. One of the main reasons for this is that currently most of my creative energies are going into wedding plans and I don't want to give away too many surprises in advance!

However, one exciting that happened is that a friend of mine asked me if I would be happy to go out with her and her husband and take some pictures with them. They never got the chance to do an engagement photo-shoot before their wedding and so now, three years into marriage, it was a nice thing to do! 

I was very flattered to be asked, particularly as my friend is a professional photographer and so her standards are pretty high! I was a bit nervous but got relaxed into it and she relaxed into being in front of the camera for a change! If you'd like to see the photos I took just pop along to her blog.

She also took some photos of my fiancé and I around  Durham and you can find these pictures on her website too but here's one of my favourites.

I hopefully won't disappear for too long again this time...

wreath making with Floral Footsteps

A very talented friend of mine has set up her own floristry-illustration-photography business in Durham called Floral Footsteps. (Check out her website here, it's good for presents!)

For the last couple of years Floral Footsteps has run traditional wreath making sessions in Durham. I didn't make it last year but was very quick to sign up this December and this is the result:

I managed to commit myself to making two wreaths, one for my mum and one for a friend, without really knowing what I was getting myself into. Having only ever made wreaths with florist's oasis before, this was much more time consuming as you begin by making your own base of moss wired onto a metal ring. I won't describe the whole process (you'll have to go to the workshop next year) but basically at the end of three hours I hadn't finished one wreath, let alone made much headway with the second! 

I had however had lots of fun. There were mince pies and mulled juice on offer and lots of happy creative company to enjoy. And, having to finish my creations at home meant that I could add bits and bobs that I had lying around the house such as the gold and red ribbon.

I used to do a bit of floristry at home at Christmastime making advent crowns and wreaths but I haven't done it for a while so was lovely to get into it again. Thank you Robyn!

back in time for Christmas!

Hello and welcome back to Ribbon Willow! As I said in my last post I had a bit of a break as life got busy. Things were starting to calm down but then I got engaged last weekend so I think it will carry on being busy for the next little while! However, I didn't want to neglect my blog any longer and I thought I'd getting a few little Christmas-themed posts in before the 25th.

Every year my parents ask me if I'd like to make their Christmas cards for them. Sometimes they're drawings or collages, this year they were photos. I went on holiday to Morocco for a week in October (look out for photos of this in the New Year!) and having taken pictures of camels during a trek, they made for perfect Christmas cards:

And here are a couple that didn't make the final cut:

It's nice to be back. Watch out for more festive posts on wreaths and Christmas jumpers!