New Hampshire wedding

We went to our friends' wedding last weekend! They are both programmers, so this was the sampler I made them:

The wedding was in New Hampshire, and it was excellent to get a brief taste of New England fall, given that it's my favorite season and there is nothing that remotely resembles it out here in the Bay. All the leaves were gold and red, and the wedding was in the White Mountains so you had beautiful views every way you looked.

The wedding weekend involved hiking, arts and crafts, making s'mores around a campfire, and sleeping in bunk beds in a giant cabin-y lodge. It was just like Girl Scout camp, and it was awesome.

East coast tour!

We had a friend's wedding over Labor Day weekend, so we decided to make a mini-vacation out of it and add on a visit to Philly and Baltimore over the following week. Since we were going to a wedding, I made a sampler:

The couple met, live, and got married in NYC, hence the skyline. Their favorite place to vacation is a cabin in Maine, where they like to hang out on the dock and eat lobsters. The groom in particular is obsessed with dorky charts, especially waterfall charts, and the apples are supposed to symbolize "the big apple" and also the fact that they both work in education.

My bestie was also at the wedding, and since we're both obsessed with Hamilton we visited his house while we were in town:

Re-enacted various songs and dances from the show:

And generally freaked out anytime we saw anything vaguely Hamilton-related:

LAFAYETTE!

After NYC, Ben and I continued on to Philly, where we ate at all our favorite restaurants and hung out with all our Philly friends (including our Littles, each of whom seem to have grown a foot since we last saw them - mine is starting 8th grade now!). We also did something we'd always meant to do when we lived there but never got around to - visited the top of City Hall. The view was pretty excellent.

Also, I knew that the William Penn statue at the top was really big, but I didn't really appreciate how big (40 feet tall + 27 tons) until standing right at its base.

We spent our last two East coast days in Baltimore, hanging out with my parents and seeing more friends. By then it was incredibly hot and humid so we mostly stayed indoors, but we ate lots of great food and played lots of Bananagrams.

Now we're back in the Bay, missing our East coast friends and hangout spots, but appreciating the cool weather and lack of humidity.

Double DC Wedding

We had two friend couples get married right in a row, both of whom have strong ties to DC, which resulted in fraternal twin samplers.

Couple 1 met and fell in love in DC but live near us in the Bay now, and are united by a shared love of reading and wine:

Couple 2 met at Salisbury University (whose logo is the outline of a seagull) and now live in DC. She's a nurse, he's a chemist who works on batteries, and they both love to bike:

Hooray for being able to reuse skyline patterns!

Philly Wedding Weekend

I haven't posted since we got to CA, since we've mostly been trying to figure out housing (we're in temporary corporate housing for now) and settle into our new jobs (I'm still at TFA but in a new role). We just signed a lease for an apartment starting September 9, so hopefully once we get all moved in and unpacked things will start to pick up a little. In the meantime, we are in Philadelphia for a wedding this weekend! The couple loves Dominion, so their sampler is a Dominion card:

The card is called "Grand Marriage" as a play on the "Grand Market" card. The Philly skyline is behind them and they are surrounded by ice cream because we would all go to the Super Scooper All-You-Can-Eat Ice Cream Festival together every summer. There's a baseball instead of a coin in the bottom left because they are both huge baseball fans, and in the bottom right, where there is usually the logo of the set the card came from, is a garnet "S" for Swarthmore since that's where they met (garnet is one of the school's color).

It feels really great to be back in Philly - we got dinner with a bunch of our Philly friends last night, and saw our Littles this morning. Since we're basically living in a hotel in SF, it feels like a temporary place we are staying while Philly is still our real home. We'll be back in October for another wedding, hopefully we'll feel more settled in SF by then.

Philly Wedding Sampler

Yesterday was wedding number three of the season! Here's the corresponding sampler:

I really liked how the first wedding sampler I made this year turned out, so I basically repeated the theme here. This time the bride and groom are wearing t-shirts with their Alma mater's logos on them (Northwestern for him, Iowa for her), the top has Penn's seal (since that's where they met), the bottom has a mountain (since they love to hike and got engaged on a mountain), and they are joined by their two cats.

Un-crossed Stitch

We had another wedding this weekend, and for the first time ever I made a sampler that wasn't cross stitched. The couple had a really cute little doodle of themselves that served as a logo of sorts for their wedding (they had it on the website, all the stationary, etc...) - I wanted that to be what I made for them, but couldn't make it look good on a grid for cross stitching. I eventually gave up and tried my hand at a different type of embroidery, and think it turned out pretty cute:

The whole thing is only 4 inches in diameter.

Now I have a new tool in my needlepoint toolbelt, yay!

First Sampler of Spring

We had our first wedding of the season yesterday! Here's what I made:

The bride and groom like hockey, so each of them is wearing a tshirt with their respective favorite team's logo on it (his is the Washington Capitals, hers is the New Jersey Devils), and he has checkerboard shoes because he likes ska. The torch at the bottom is the logo of Rowan University, which is where they met and got engaged, and at the top is an outline of New Jersey since that's where they live and where they got married. This was my first time making a circular pattern like this, and I am happy with how it turned out!

Bay Area Revisited

After Thanksgiving, we went to San Francisco for a wedding. But first - SUSHIRRITO!!

SO BEAUTIFUL

I look insane, because I am.

We also ate lots of other things and saw lots of friends and generally enjoyed not having to be bundled up in winter gear in December. Then - the wedding!! It was lovely and wonderful in all the ways a wedding can be lovely and wonderful. Plus, I made this:

(The grooms live in SF, grow lots of things in their backyard - hence the American Gothic farmer outfits and all the veggies, one is a chemical engineer, and the other plays hand bells.)

Now we are back in Philly, cold and Sushirrito-less but happy to be home after lots of travel.

Moose and Giraffe

Another wedding tonight! Here was the sampler for the happy couple:

(Their wedding had a moose and giraffe theme, since he grew up in Maine and she grew up in Botswana.)

We just got back, and in a mere five hours I get to wake up and head to the airport to fly to Milwaukee for week three of work travel - woo!

Under the Weather Wedding

We had another wedding this weekend! We dosed up on dayquil so we could power through it, and had a great time - although we slept for 12 hours afterward so clearly our bodies were not happy with us about it.

Wedding highlight - they had FIVE wedding cakes! Each more delicious than the last.

Wedding sampler:

(The couple got engaged in Australia, the bride is a physician's assistant, the groom is a musician, and they really like alpacas - they have a bunch of alpaca art in their house.)

Off to sleep for another 12 hours before getting up early for a flight tomorrow - I've lost my voice, which always happens when I get a cold, but since I'm supposed to spend this week interviewing applicants I hope it comes back soon...

Boston and belated wedding sampler

We went to Boston this weekend! We were mostly visiting our friends who just had a baby, and swooning over said baby, but I also delivered a wedding sampler. A few friends got married before I started making them so I'm slowly working through the "backlog," and was able to give one to its owners this weekend:

Closer up:

The martini is self-explanatory, the bottle is the husband's favorite bourbon:


I really wanted to make something for the new baby, but had to stop myself because it's hard enough keeping up with all the weddings, so if I start doing all the babies my fingers will probably fall off.

J+J Sampler

This weekend was the second wedding in our year of eight weddings! Of course, I made a sampler:

The happy couple has a story where Jessie was abroad and trying to talk to Joe on a cell phone - it was raining and she was standing on a stump in a muddy field of chickens while juggling the phone and an umbrella. Hence the sampler of that situation, but with the two of them together!

Blackwork Orange

The first wedding in our year-of-seven-weddings was this past weekend near Plymouth - our hotel was literally across the street from Plymouth Rock:

It's a rock! An underwhelming rock!

The wedding itself was fun - we got all dressed up and had a great time hanging out with friends.

We look like grownups!

The couple met in Philly, and she's a huge Jane Austen fan, so this was the sampler I made them:

I bought a book on blackwork recently and was excited to try it out for the first time in this project - except I didn't want to do it in black since I thought that would be too dour for a wedding sampler. I picked orange because it is bright and happy, and also so I could make the pun in this post's title.

Ooooh.... ahhhh....

It was a fun technique to learn, and my book has a bunch more patterns I want to try out - good thing I have a bunch more weddings to create samplers for!

Nerd love through the ages

I officiated my friends' amazingly nerdy wedding this weekend! I'm still too flabbergasted to write about it coherently, so let me just share that the ringbearer was a falcon and leave it at that.

In this photo I've just retrieved the rings from the falcon.
I'm also tremendously relieved that nobody got pooped on.

For their wedding gift, I made them a sampler themed "nerd love through the ages." It's one of the more complicated samplers I have made, but I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Here are close-ups of the individual couples, since it's kind of hard to see them in that picture.

Han Solo & Princess Leia (Star Wars)	Aragorn & Arwen (Lord of the Rings)	Apollo & Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica)
Westley & Buttercup (The Princess Bride)	Chris & Alana (The actual couple!)	Ron & Hermione (Harry Potter)
Rory & Amy (Doctor Who)	Wash & Zoe (Firefly)	Fry & Leela (Futurama)

I had a lot of fun making it, but it also made me realize (for the umpteenth time) how white and heteronormative most nerd culture is.

We've already got five weddings on the docket for next year - I better get cracking!

Russian Wedding

Yesterday we went to my cousin's wedding right outside of Philly. He's a cousin on my dad's side, meaning he is Russian (as is his new bride), meaning it was a traditional eat-and-drink-until-you-explode Russian wedding. Here is our table when we first entered the reception:

Things to note about this photo:

1. This is the cold appetizers, and the cold appetizers only. Those two stands are there so they can bring out more plates and have multiple levels of cold and hot appetizers going on.
2. In addition to the three bottles of wine on the table, there is also a large bottle of cognac and a big bottle of vodka (in the back, by my dad). There was this much alcohol at every table (as in, one large bottle of vodka for every eight people, in addition to all the wine and cognac).

I didn't really take pictures of the various courses as they came out because I was too busy eating, but the entrees were lamb, beef, salmon, and ravioli. Notice that I said and - those weren't the options you could choose from, there was a giant platter of each of those things at each table. By the time all those courses were done it was about 11:00 pm and they started clearing all our plates - we thought it was time for dessert, but it was time for shish kebabs! All meat, too - chicken and more lamb. It wasn't time for dessert until closer to midnight, but it's a good thing we had some time to digest because this was the dessert table:

This is just one half, there is an equal amount on the other side of the cake.

We got home around 1 am, but the party was still going strong when we left - it probably went until 3 or 4, and they probably made it through all of the alcohol.

Also, before all the festivities started, Ben and I attempted to take a nice picture since we don't usually dress up. Here's how that turned out:
I guess it's not surprising that we don't have more nice pictures together...

Ann Arbor!

Last week was my last in San Francisco; Friday morning we flew to Ann Arbor for our friends' wedding, and I just arrived in Charlotte for a week-long work conference. After that I'll meet up with Ben in San Diego for a few days of vacation before we finally return home to Philly!

We had thought we would spend some time exploring Ann Arbor this weekend, but a combination of rain and jet lag resulted in us only really leaving the hotel for the wedding itself. It was at the University of Michigan, which is home to the fanciest water fountains and coolest-named conference rooms I've ever encountered.

Marble and wood paneling!

WOLVERINE ROOM!

Also, because of this crazy sign in the hallway, I learned that the U of M was initially supposed to be a “Catholepistemiad,” which is an academy of universal knowledge. Vocabulary building!

The bride is even craftier than I am, as evidenced by - among many other impressive wedding crafts - this glorious cake topper:

The cake is giant lego pieces!

However, I did attempt to contribute my own nerdy craftiness in the form of the wedding sampler I made them:

10 points for whoever decodes the binary border first!

We would have liked to stay longer today to keep socializing, but the flight options out of Detroit are pretty limited so we had to head out bright and early. It seems the TSA knew I was coming, though, or at least knew where I was going - check out the liner in the security checkpoint trays:

Cool, but I can't say I'm thrilled to be associated with the TSA.

Two weeks and two cities until we're back home!