One month to my wedding and a wedding planner has never seemed more like a good idea. It’s not that there’s loads left to be planned, it’s just that the budget is already creaking as we push against it a little more. So, more and more is having to be done by us, personally. “Aww, how sweet”, you say. “The personal touch will really make the day. Hands on wins hands down.”  Well, yes, but I’d love to have spent yesterday chilling out, watching Dexter or catching up on podcasts. Instead, I found myself in arts supplies shops for the first time since I was about 12. Why haven’t I been in to them since? Because I am shit at make and do.

Show me a sheet of card and some pens and I become a quivering wreck. Tell me I have to use glue somehow and I come completely unstuck. So there will be no glue; that’s my one reprieve. It will all have to hang together with clips and folding. I even bought some stencilling frames. By the time I got home, with a huge bag of rolled up things and coloured things and ink that makes you high, I was seriously edgy and I was the one who was going to have to do the cutting. Please, give the scissors to the woman who looks most likely to cut something! Someone in my head whispered, “Hold it like a bunch of flowers.” Someone in my head got a dirty, ink-high look.

6 table cards and 60 place name markers (extra to allow for inevitable errors) later, I was spent. I was literally fit for nothing else. Just remembering to let the ink dry before splodging down the next stencil on top of it was taxing every last bit of my non crafty brain. Rarely do I wish to be other people – it’s futile, I’ve tried – but last night I longed to be my sister, just for an hour or two. She’s a ceramicist and a brilliant one at that. There’s nothing she can’t make, or draw, or coax out of stone and train to be something much, much better than it was. She tried to give me a lesson once, about 10 years ago and I ended up in tears of frustration. The seeds of this were sown in a pottery class we took together in our teens: she turned out vases and beautiful little figures – I made one scary clown jewellery box and a thousand things that shattered in the kiln. I don’t think it was down to air bubbles in the clay (caused by my own shoddy kneading, in my eagerness to get making scary clown jewellery boxes); I think it was the kiln, refusing to let my pieces see the light of day, shattering both the pieces and any notions I had of a career in applied arts. Good call, kiln.

So there I sat last night, smithereens of card all over the living room, marker all over my fingers, high as a kite. The results may not be pretty, or organised or even real (it’s possible none of this ever happened, although it did), but the fiancé and I cut and folded those place markers til our fingers were near bleeding. Ourselves. Who needs a planner? We probably had too much free time before all this industry -  we just didn’t know it. We may now spend most of our days on the phone to immigration services, London bus companies and people who make cakes (I’m not touching that one) and we may have a million things to get through in the next month, but come the big day, our guests will know where to sit. By god, will  they know where to sit. Will they? It’s a question. They may not be able to read my hand-writing. That too, is shit.

But that’s another story.

(Hammy Hamster sails by in a tiny boat. Possibly an ink-induced delusion. Possibly. )

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 1:31 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.