Celebrations Galore!

A very busy weekend at the House of Marmalade. We had the carnival to start with. Luckily the weather was just right, not too hot, plenty of breeze and no rain despite the looming clouds. I love Carnival day! It's a real party atmosphere and everyone comes out to play. It's the one day of the year where you can guarantee seeing pretty much everyone you know in the village.

This is our street, and we live right in the middle of it, next door to Mr and Miss T who invited me to their pavement party to watch the shirt race and the floats go by.

Mr Marmalade was one of the competitors in the Shirt Race with his friend Tim. You can read all about the shirt race and what it is if you click the picture below. It's Mr Marmalade pushing a 'stable'

Here's the front. They had been busy all week preparing and you can see it took a lorralorra work! It's supposed to be a take on the Queens Jockey drug scandal that has been in the news recently.


After seeing the various processions go by - pictures of which you can see here, everyone goes to the field for the main events. The most popular show in the arena this year was "Jive Pony". I had imagined that this would be dancing ponies (after all there were dancing dogs and dancing sheep too), but no! I was stunned. Here we had two lovely girls, doing striptease on the back of a cantering (yes cantering) pony in time to the song "Do You Love Me?"

Look! No hands!! Spectacular! It all happens in this village I tell you!

Mr Marmalade and I have only missed a couple of carnival days since we've lived here. One of those was in 1997 when we got married! Some people didn't come to our wedding in favour of the Carnival, but luckily the most important ones did. Ofcourse we are forever in their debt.

Very greedily, we had two weddings, one in the registry office on the Friday, and then a 'proper' wedding on the Saturday. I had always wanted to get married in leather, so that's what I wore in the registry office where it was just us two and our two witnesses. Just what we wanted, but my mother had other ideas...

The next day, off we trundled to a hotel in Alcester for the "ceremony". We had a "green wedding" which doesn't mean that we all wore a green outfits, but that it was as 'eco friendly' (to give it a label) and inexpensive as we could make it - total cost around £2k including dresses! We had a hog roast and hedgerow wines after an outdoor Pagan ceremony. My dress was made of crepe with a silk chiffon cape. Here it is.

It was the lady who made this dress who inspired me to sew. She was Amazing (note capital A). The most creative person I have ever, and probably will ever know. Which leads me to the next cause for celebration this weekend.

Look!!! I am famous!!!!! I am in this month's issue of Sew Magazine ... Not once...

but TWICE!!!!


This is good news for me because although I haven't mentioned it for a while, my "idea" is taking shape and I hope to have further news by August.

In the meantime, I better get on with some serious sewing now that I have a reputation to live up to!!