Wedding Anniversary: Paper

Wedding anniversary celebrations, disclosed to the world on Facebook, have always annoyed me slightly. Given so many of my friends are single or divorced, having other smug married friends rub it into their faces with outpourings of emotion over their soulmates is a little mawkish, in my view.

That said, Mr Mermaid and I do love to celebrate our wedding anniversary (and keep it on the down-low). True, we have been married just three years but it is fun to mark the anniversary of the day we both became tax-incentivised adults with the full legal and financial – I mean, the day we celebrated our love publicly in the honourable institution of marriage. Ahem.

Apart from the smug satisfaction of having outlasted the Kardashians in their various marital endeavours, it is good to be able to use the nearest weekend as an excuse to get away from everything and everyone else and focus on our gratitude to God and each other.

That said, finding appropriate gifts can sometimes be problematic. If one follows the traditional rules around giving - paper, cotton, leather, etc, then getting something good for a reasonable price is not easy. Correction: it is easier for men to buy for women than the other way around.

For our first year, paper, I wanted to get Mr Mermaid some bespoke, quality stationery. I explored some of the high-end options from boutiques he appreciates, such as Smythson, Aspinall and Liberty.

But the price tags for what I wanted were phenomenal. No discounts - and a starting price of at least £100. By the time all the bespokery (is there such a word? There is now) would have been completed, I would be looking at a bill of nearly £300.

Now I love my husband greatly but there is no way I would spend £300 on paper. The very idea was ridiculous. Notwithstanding the fact we had just got married and were, therefore, broke, I have always laboured under the principle that if you can feasibly make something yourself, then do not pay for it. I am a card crafter. I am artistic. Therefore branching out into stationery did not seem too high a leap for me.

Cue Amazon. I had seen in various high-end stores boxes of luxury cards from a certain company, retailing for about £40 for blank notelet cards (not folded). I figured I could get the same blank cards for less on Amazon. I did. 50 cream Crown Mill luxury cards with matching lined envelopes, for £26.99 plus P&P. 

Crown Mill laid paper in Cream

I also bought one tiny wooden-handled rubber stamper of a star, and a square inkpad in military green. On a different site I paid just under £5 for a personalised black-ink stamp with my husband’s details on it. A few day later, all my materials had arrived - for less than £50.

It took a few practice runs on scrap paper to get the right pressure and, having carefully marked in faint pencil straight lines on each card front, created a bespoke set of stationery that looked professional, felt professional and cost barely anything. I have had to remove our address from the below, of course.. so you can only get a rough idea of how nice this looked. 

What's inside the box? Personalised Stationery, of course!

As I had some money left over from my original budget of £70 for gifts for George, I meandered to my local picture framing store, which has won many awards for its creative framing. I spent £24 getting five hearts cut out of the stiff card by their laser cutter (I got to keep the bits of heart-shaped card), and printed out in colour five Google maps: where we both grew up, where we met, where we married, where we live (this bit was free).

Wedding Anniversary gift idea: personalised maps

This now adorns my husband's study wall, and he loved his stationery. And all for a bargain, whereas if I had opted for ordering all these things from another artisan, I could have spent between 300-400 smackers.

So I am now in the business of making bespoke stationery, as well as cards and jewellery! Oh and with those cut-out hearts, I made several Valentine's Day cards in various styles, which I sold for approximately £2 each.

Perfect Party Planning for January... on a budget!

Several of my friends are having birthdays or having to attend post-Christmas children's parties ("Let it Goooo, Let it Goooooo") in January and early February - just at the tightest financial time of the year. Of course this lends itself to a fiscal dilemma - trying to make the special day special without breaking the bank.

The other year, we threw a surprise party for a friend's daughter who was 21. Being a steampunk aficionado, we spent an evening working out ways to design and create a themed party for her, while keeping a tight budget. The idea was to have as much as possible for as little as possible - I think the whole party, food included, was meant to be under £100.

The results were amazing, and only involved a little paper, cardboard tubes, glass jars, scissors, twine, glue and good old-fashioned grit. Oh, and a lot of imagination and gold paint spray.

The following tips are perfect for any celebration, especially for a money-saving New Year party.

1) Bunting
To decorate a wall or garden, bunting is ideal as it takes up a lot of space and can transform a plain wall into a perfect party room.

How to
Rather than throw out old cotton or linen sheets, wash them, and cut out small triangles of equal size. Take some soft twine or strong wool, and attach each triangle to the twine, allowing a couple of inches space between each triangle. To attach, simply fold a little bit of the cloth over the twine and either staple or do a running stitch. Alternating colours of cloth makes for a pretty pattern.

2) Teasing tea-lights
Baby food jars can make great ornaments, especially if you want to light up your garden. Tying 20 or so to a tree and filling the garden with twinkling tea lights is a wonderful touch, or dot them around
staircases or mantelpieces to add a bit of seasonal sparkle.

Go home Lantern, you're drunk

Right-side Up

You will need:
Baby food jars
Some thin but strong wire - jewellery wire or picture wire
Some natural foliage from the garden
Some battery-operated tealights

How to:
Clean as many baby food jars as you can. Put a tiny layer of leafage at the bottom of the jar. Use the wire to create a little 'basket handle' around the lip of the jar. Make it as high and hooped as possible. Cover any unsightly knots and ties around the jar with a little (non prickly) foliage. Test the tealight and make sure it can sit reasonably straight on the foliage. Otherwise it gets drunk and falls over, like the wee lantern on the left...

3) Lovely labels
Make food more inviting by creating themed mini menu cards to stick into dishes and sit alongside cakes.

How to:
Print out some coloured paper to match your bunting / colour theme.
Many crafting website offer free print-outs of party paper in myriad colours and patterns, and fix onto a sheet of card.
Any card will do; empty boxes or Christmas cards are perfect, as it helps to recycle and clear up after Christmas.
Choose whichever shape suits you and make a template to trace around as many as you need.
Take a nice pen; gold or silver or black make stand-out descriptions. When the ink dries, use a little sellotape to stick toothpicks onto the back of the card and use to adorn your table.

4) Paper chains get perky
A great way to use up leftover paper is in the making of paper chains.
Whether you use coloured paper, newspaper or shiny metallic paper, the outcome can look swell. We used old photocopied sheet music, copied onto some cream-coloured paper I had leftover from my wedding craft box. The effect was striking.

How to:
Choose your paper scheme cut into even strips
Glue or use double-sided tape on one end and hoop each strip through to complete a chain.

And why stop at chains? We also traced some cogs of different size onto cardboard, traced onto metallic coloured card and created a string of brass-shimmery cogs, fastened with metal paper fasteners.

5) Paper roses
I made roses out of an old, battered version of my favourite book and a copy of the Financial Times - where I met my husband - for my wedding bouquet, and for my bridesmaids.

This was the FIRST time I had ever made the roses - and the FIRST time I had ever done ANY flower arranging. So I guess it was a success!

Me with my bouquet getting ready 

One of my bridesmaid's bouquets

In addition to being lovely wedding bouquets that really will last forever (and cost next-to-nothing to make), I have given out single ones and smaller arrangements. These make magnificent gifts for individuals and a wonderful ornament for the dining table if you are having a family meal or dinner with friends.

Unique and budget wedding or party decoration

You will need
Some 16- gauge green florists' wire
Paper - lots of it
A glue gun
Some thin jewellery wire
Some sparkly beads from broken necklaces
Any stick-on sparkles

How to
These will take time but I PROMISE they will look amazing.
Cut five sizes of petal. The smallest should be as small as the tip of your index finger, the next a little larger, the next larger still and so on until you have some large and broad petals.
Imagine a rose and shape each of your cut out books or coloured paper like a real petal. Slightly curl the tips of the two larger size petals to make them resemble real rose petals.
Start with twisting a small bead onto a piece of wire, and wrapping it around the top of the florist's wire. Imagine this as the stamen of the rose.
Then start to wrap the smallest petals around the wire, using a little hot glue at the bottom of each one to fix it. Use five of each size for each rose.
Start on the second size petals, fixing them around with glue on the bottom of each one, slightly overlapping each one.

By the time you get to the third layer it will start to look like a rose bud. On the last layer, you will need to cut a little bit into the bottom of the petal so that it can wrap around the bottom of the rose better. You can start to shape the petals a little when it is formed. Use a little ribbon or green tissue paper to cover up the messy base of the flower, cutting it like the sepals of a real rose.

It takes about 40 minutes. So it does take time, but these roses last forever. And if you want to go the extra mile, try making these bespoke - perhaps out of photocopies of someone's favourite poems or book. I suggest using a COPY of their favourite book... don't just chop up their limited edition signed by Margaret Atwood. Just a suggestion...

Eat your Way to Five Pounds a Day

Jabba loves dat chicken. MMM finger lickin' good.

I have been trying to eat less by eating smaller meals, more regularly. 

However I have been failing. We keep being sent sweets and treats to the office, which means that instead of slowly losing weight, little by little, I am probably gaining the pounds, little by little, until a month before the wedding I suddenly wake up out of my desk-fodder induced stupor and cry: “I am never going to fit into my Pronovia 2013 collection design”.

This is the fault of a desk job, according to workplace health advisers Vielife. A survey conducted among Brits found that 12 million of us suffer from “Nutrition Attrition”.

This means workers have eschewed their five a day in favour of free cake and easy sandwiches, which may be convenient, but it is hardly helping them to work effectively and healthily.

The data showed that more than 40,000 working adults in the UK - based on Vielife online health and wellbeing assessments - show that 36 per cent of working people have poor nutrition, creating personal health risks and losing 3.5 weeks of productive time each a year - an urgent wake-up call for employers and businesses.

Only one out of 10 people said they eat the recommended six portions of fibre per day and less than one in five people manage to eat their five portions of fruit and vegetables.

Actually, I am good like that. I eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables. I just like to wash them down with a packet of crisps afterwards.

However, Vielife found that people with a ‘good’ nutrition score have a 6 per cent higher job satisfaction score and 15 per cent higher mood score than people with a ‘poor’ nutrition score.

Stress levels increase for those without a decent diet - perhaps not surprising; but absenteeism increases. Respondents with poor nutrition scores report 50 per cent more sickness absence than those with good nutrition scores. That’s 4.8 days a year per employee against 3.2 days a year, costing the average UK organisation an extra 576 days for every 1000 people employed.

This means productivity declines, costs in cover increases and the whole team suffers as a result of one person’s doughnut disorder.

But if we ate better and cared more for ourselves and our staff, we could not only work better but maybe also play better, take up hobbies, have energy to do other tasks or go to events more often.

What this means for providers is that they should be kind to my waistline and instead of offering the odd lunch or chocolate goodie, they should just hurl a banana in my direction.

What this means for me is that if I want to earn more and to be more productive, eating healthier and fresher means I might lose those 5lbs but I’ll gain £5 a day in additional revenue through freelance or selling more of my handmade jewellery and cards.

This will also help to paying for that dress.

stars and stripes

So I was at another wedding on Saturday, which was wonderful. But I'm not going to bore you with stories about dancing queens. No, instead I shall tell you about my journey there and back. After all, was it not Sterne who once said: "To travel is better than to arrive?" Or was that someone else? No matter, he was talking balls.

THE JOURNEY THERE

Waiting for the taxi to arrive chez moi, I thought it expedient to ask the operator what colour car would be picking me up. "A white peugeot". It was a blue skoda.
Then the guy got lost. A 20-min drive took nearly an hour. He should have driven me to south croydon. He took me to West Wycombe. Then he almost lost the entrance to the Hotel and Golf Club and nearly crashed into the wall...

The Journey back

I know - once bitten, twice should be shy. But it was nearly 1pm, I was sharing with a couple of friends, and the taxi firm is cheap. I also naively assumed that, having already driven there, the driver would be able to find his way back relatively easily. But the first conversation with the taxi firm operator went thusly:

"Please may I have a taxi to Streatham"
"Where is that?"
"You ARE streatham vale taxis?"
"Yes"
"Well, Streatham is where you are"
"Oh yes okay ma'am thank you very much okay where you want go to?"
"Streatham"
"WHere picking you up from tonight"
"The Selsdon Park Hotel"
"Where is that?"
"In Selsdon"
"What is the name of the place in Selsdon"
"The... Selsdon... Park... Hotel"
"I will send him...he has a silver peugeot. What is your name?
I lied: "SAM"
"How do you spell that madam pliss"
"S - A - M"


Of course by now I should have been worrying. But I did not start really worrying until 45 minutes later when my phone rang and a croaky foreign voice creaked out: "Hello lady? I am ringing to say that I am not the same driver, I am the different driver"
"Right... so do you know where you are going?"
"I will be there in 15 minutes. Where is it?"
"Selsdon Park Hotel. It has an exclusive driveway"
"I will drive into the Park"
"Um... not the park, don't drive it into the park, it's going to end up in the playground... it's called the Selsdon Park Hotel and Golf Club."
"You at the golf club or at the park?"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Breathe...1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10...

"No dear, let's take this from the top. Drive down the A23 to Croydon and on the flyover, take the A2022. Continue down towards Sanderstead, and then you will find a BIG BIG BIG Sainsbury's on the roundabout. The entrance to the SELSDON PARK HOTEL AND GOLF CLUB is right next door, the very very very first entrance on the LEFT. DRIVE UP THE DRIVEWAY. IT HAS YELLOW POSTS AND TYRE MARKS IN THE FLOWERBED FROM YOUR LAST DRIVER"

"yiss yiss I have I know - I three minutes, maybe three, maybe 10 minutes away"...

By now it was half one and I wanted to cry. Miraculously... it was a silver peugeot -and he knew the way back home. However, he did not seem to believe me that I lived on a one-way street. I ended up having to walk up my road simply to stop him reversing several times into the Police Station in the road adjacent to mine. What a croc!

IN OTHER NEWS

I saw a shooting star! It was travelling extremely fast, and almost completely horizontally across the horizon! How cool is that? And no, it was not a firework. And yes, I did make a wish.

What message would you like to leave?

Maybe it's just that I've been to too many weddings recently that I am suffering from what I call post-wishes fatigue. Perhaps I am bitter that none of those weddings have been my own, and I am merely jealous. Though if any of you had seen the groom on one occasion, there would be a petition right now outside of parliament to amend the Human Rights Act. Teeth simply should not be like that.

Post-wishes fatigue occurs when you finally get around to phoning in in order to give some money to the happy couple. Despite the fact you actually spent money getting to the wedding, buying drinks at the cash bar, possibly buying a wedding outfit and a disposable camera because you keep forgetting to take your digital one with you, darn it. (Try stapling it to your hand the night before).

Post Wishes Fatigue starts with a simple spoken pleasantry. You hear from a friend or relative that they are to tie the knot. If you are like me (female or gay), you will probably clap your hands together in a happy way and say something like: "Oh how exciting, congratulations, when is it?". If you are not like me (male or an ugly spinster), you will probably say: "Really? Are you expecting a baby.?" But we deal not with the latter, but the former.

Then of course, you spend weeks and weeks talking wedding, planning how to get to wedding, what to wear for wedding, who else is invited, what the bride/groom is wearing, blah blah blah until you know as much about the day as the bride or groom does.

The day of the wedding comes. You write a card out for the happy couple. "Wishing you every happiness in your married lives together" or some such yadda. You greet the happy couple on the day with more congratulations, you look wonderfuls and Thank you so much for inviting mes. Just when you think the smile on your face will crack you find there's a book of condolences to sign. "Dearest Princess of Hearts, you will always be with us. I will never visit Paris again in Spring without thinking of you."
I think I got barred from that wedding reception.

You stare at the book of congrats, probably slightly sozzled by then, and desperately try to think of something witty and beautiful that someone else has not said. You skim-read the other pages, probably dribbling wine and spittle over it, and of course it's all written in fountain pen, but the ink runs out while you try to use it and all you have in your bag or pocket is a chewed-up biro. And it's red. In the light of your pikey shame all you can muster is: "Wishing you all the best for your married lives together" and hoping that it's "lives" and not "life" and wondering whether you wrote that in the card as well. Not that they'd notice anyway, because you could only find half an orange crayon to write on the card with.

Skulking back to your seat, you think you can relax, but NO! Along comes a second uncle twice removed, It could be Uncle Leo, Harry or Jake, you can't remember, although you know it's not uncle Norm, who wasn't really your uncle but he hung around anyway until he disappeared "Up North" and your mum had to explain with a Barbie doll why Uncle Norm no longer visits. "Where exactly did he put the cake? Show me on the barbie... are you sure it was on your head?" Where was I?
Oh, Uncle Leo, or Harry, comes up with a video camera and shoves it into your mug and says: "Send your wishes!"

This reminds me of a funny story recently. Mum and I were in Greece for a wedding and someone came up to us with a video camera. It was late and we were not paying too much attention. He said: "Wishes.... speak wishes." Mum looked flustered for a second, before replying: "I wish I were 29 again."

So you're put on the spot and have to think of something that does not sound banal. The best one I ever heard was at the same Greek wedding where my friend Simon, glass of port in one hand and a fat cigar in the other, waded up to the lens, raised both cigar and wine, said: "Cheers" and walked off. Class.

What else can you say: "Best wishes for the future and all that, blah blah?" There simply is nothing in those old Victorian etiquette books that prepares one for this sort of enforced bonhomie. It's enough to make you eschew all friendships, tear up your phone book and take to yelling "Bah humbug" at random passers by (this works well if you live near a bus stop and can shout it out of the window without anyone seeing you. Hours of fun. Note to self - Get out more. Not to weddings. Staple note to hand so don't forget).

You think you've escaped when you get home. But no, there's the post-wedding "heck I forgot to contribute to their present/honeymoon/cosmetic surgery" moment when you fish around your bag and find the wedding invitation and gift list stuck to it with a piece of old chewing gum. So you ring up. Phew! It's not too late. How much do you want to contribute? ("what's the minimum limit on a credit card?" is not an acceptable answer, I have since discovered.) When all the details are taken, you go to thank the helpful assistant.

but wait....

"What message would you like to leave on the card?"

"There's a CARD?"

"Any message for the couple?"

Slight moment of panic.

"Um... er... best wishes for your married lives (or is it life?) together."