"I wish I'd got drunk at the wedding", or "A little bit of reception history".

I'm so excited about this little square! And so you can imagine what I get like when I am in charge of a hula hoop. That's what was worrying my sons this weekend; it was middle son's wedding, and I announced I'd like to take my hula hoop, and also make a short speech. Terror gripped them!

The little square arose directly out of the wedding, as I had to get in the bath a day or so after it, in order to calm down, (It was their fault! If only someone had got me a big drink of beer instead of the lemonade I got myself, which merely fuelled me to new heights!) and I thought that just the thing to take to read in the bath would be a book on something repetitive, and I selected this, written in 1903 before a lot of exciting things happened:

This got me thinking about psalm 119, which is nothing if not repetitive, and I thought "How lucky I am!" that this thought-bath had been so successful! And what is more, my bath (of yore, that is) even made it into one of the speeches; not mine, rather, one of the two best men remembered that when he was a schoolboy, he once burst in on me in the bath when he was looking for somewhere to be sick. (No, he didn't actually, he must have found somewhere else.)

So I got out of the bath after about 3 hours - yes I had a sleep in there - and ignored all the mess around me and got out mi colouring pencils, ruler and Japanese 0.3mm pencil for accurate drawing, and got to work.

And then it got coloured in, and the whole thing has taken off in my mind. I thought too that I ought to read ps 119 again (I might be implying a lie there - have I ever read all of it before?) And so I did, and got out the commentaries by Davidson, Eaton, Alter, Prinsloo (oh I love the Prinsloo one, it's in the big Eerdmans volume, and he talks about the meaning so well and succinctly, and has a diagram too), Dodd, Weiser (so very mid-20thC on this one!)  and so on.... I have more, but... and of course I'd already got it into my head about it being an acrostic, with 8 verses hanging on each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And there was more 8-ness yet, with 8 words for 'the law' (sort of) being used, one in every 176 verses except 2 of them. I looked back at my little square (see top pic) and saw how there is a lot of 8-ness about that, look work that out for yourself if interested, and I was pleased.

Ps 119 thread

There was one verse in the psalm that I learnt in childhood, v 105 'Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path', and I had earmarked this as the basis for the idea for this psalm design. I was thinking of having it written out somewhere, (my wonderful sewing machine will do this, you see) but then it evolved that I thought I would instead merely represent it in colours, as I had already bought a reel of cotton specifically for this verse. It goes from dark to light and back again in long repeats, like a light that guides you and sometimes flickers or doesn't show quite everything you think you need. I thought that the author of the psalm was actually quite interested in pattern as well as the stated subject matter, and so for once we would all go with pattern and leave words hinted at in an abstract way. The basis of the design you see is actually the structure of some Arab lattice work (as the book rather unspecifically calls it), and they loved their patterns-not-pictures-and-words too. (S'funny - 'Thy word...' and yet I have decided to leave out the words I first thought I'd put in! 'Thy word' is shelved!)

But there is yet more.... It being the wedding, lovely son bought his mum a bouquet of flowers, and it happened that the colours of cloth I'd chosen for the design were sooooo like them! How does this happen?

Eric, doing things properly with a bone folder as used in bookbinding.

And like my wedding hat ribbon and skirt fabric! And the now-wilting roses I'd put in a bowl for the tea party for our new in-laws! So everything was coming together in uncanny ways. And then I went out of the room, (oooh sorry did I galumph?) and the flowers must have wobbled, and the thing fell off and landed on the floor with a flopppp! (being in one of those clever cellophane vases). So I transferred them from the floor to a vase, and found I had some lovely gold crinkly paper left that I am drying over the side of the cot. This took me back to the hour before the wedding, when my Polyfilla makeup exploded over my cream silk blouse and I had to wash and iron it to be presentable. I just about managed, but should have not ironed it as the designer-crinkles were flattened out of the front of it! I was distraught! I was soon OK though when I proudly walked down to church with my little grandson. (I'm saving the crinkly paper for him; look here he is making envelopes for the rose petal confetti. Yes, he drinks champagne while he works).

The happy couple

And soooooo - the wedding was fab, fab, fab. I know, I know, 'What did you wear?' (A tablecloth actually, the one on the right not the left; the neck gear was what I started to make when I was 14 and I decided to stop now and use it, unfinished, as a scarf. That, or finish it by the time I am 306 at this rate.) Here I am with Father Liz. We were both very happy, as our husbands had just done well, mine had just married his son, hers had played the organ superbly, including that Widor thing.

And the speech? Mine seemed to go down well, written as it was on the back of a credit-card-sized piece of card, its main theme being my son's lovely dimples and his flicked-up eyebrow (aw, fond MUM stuff! Look closely at the pic below of the darling and his lovely bride!), and the naughty story that I seemed to get away with (well they did ask for it!). After that, the hula hoop came out, and I remember very little except madly hula-ing - oh dearrrrrrr - I will go down with the in-laws' guests as 'that mother who took her hula hoop to the wedding'. Why did no-one get me a stiff drink and sit me down? The only thing that finally calmed me was the cigar. I wish I'd had it earlier. Unaccustomed as I am to smoking at all, nevertheless I did it perfectly, and managed to stop before I was sick in anyone's bath or anything.

The wedding, as I say, was fab fab fab, and the bride and groom looked the equal of Wills and Kate any day, and I hope their pic appears big at the end of this post.

Somehow it was all too much for someone with 'my condition' to cope with in any other way, I suppose, and perhaps I could have done worse that to madly hula and dance for 3 hours non-stop. My hula muscles were very sore the next day, but I still managed to have a go outside the vicarage door (see below) and do a demo, as I gathered that people were starting to demand lessons. Only my sister and I could really do it, properly brought up you see, oh, and one bloke whom I didn't manage to photograph. No, the hoop is pink, but the light caught it here rather spectacularly. (She's going to get herself one, by the way.)

The wonderful Carol - she is, you know, more than you will know.

I really worry about me, I know I'm a bit on the 'something'-spectrum, but in the end it worked out, I didn't disgrace myself tooo much I hope (did I boys, did I, oh I do hope not?!), and at the end of it there was such a burst of something-or-other that my design for psalm 119 just flowed out of me. Now to sew it.

I know - the hula video is sideways. I need to lie down sometime!

High or wot? Water - my downfall!

(Psalm 119. The finished piece will be in Southwark Cathedral teashop in November, and probably some progress reports here on the blog in due course. Joolz & Soph are now on their way to Spain on a boat. Or in a boat. On or in? On earth or in earth, as it is in heaven? Oh get me a cigar someone and shut me down.)

Wills & Kate, move over! Joolz & Soph are here now.