FO: Wedding Dolls

Ooooo look at their utter cuteness!

As you will see from What's on my needles: March 2012 these wedding dolls were created for my big brothers wedding! Which took place yesterday :)




This piece took quite a few months to complete, mainly because I kept getting distracted by other pieces! Its been finished for over a week but i wasn't allowed to publish anything about it as they wanted it as a surprise for them and for the other guests. All in all it didn't take that many hours, the pattern just covers the figures and uses a different dress and includes a veil was used as the basis for the piece. Although it is an expensive pattern, it is worth it if you are a beginner crocheter as half of the pattern is instructional pictures explaining different steps and the way the pieces are assembled.






So my little additions include:
Paul
-A rock climbing harness that Paul is wearing,
-Lime climbing shoes
-Blue and red climbing rope (handspun)
-Climbing helmet, smaller than head, but a helmet that would have fit just looked stupid
Rachael
-Exercise books
-Rachael's wedding planning book
-SLR camera
-The colours of the bouquet were the colours of her sisters bridesmaids dresses.
The Base
The base consisted of 11 white rings, one for each year they were together, then the sisters colours in age order, Michelle the next eldest in blue, then Juliette in green and Alison in the dusky pink.

The materials used were various bits and bats of 4ply acrylic but also scraps of stash yarn. I bought a 10" cake drum for the base and cut it down for the base ;).

On another note the wedding was amazing, it was so beautiful and the weather turned out brilliantly for it! Unfortunately 60 of my 94 chocolates got misplaced! And we're left upstairs overnight and do ended up melted, but they all still tasted lovely. Unsurprisingly I wasn't impressed! But what can you do! Silly people moving things!

I'm a chocolate truffle making machiiiiine!!

So my big brothers wedding is on the horizon, under a week to go, this thursday. I agreed back at Christmas to make the wedding favours after Rachael tasted one of my little chocolates I made for friends as little Christmas presents.

It's been a hectic few days, there are 94 guests and I needed to make just under 400 choccies so each guest hand 4 little hand made chocolates. I say hand made, does melting chocolate down and adding cream and alcohol and then just putting it into moulds count?! Well I reckon it kind of does! There not fancy, just there definitely chocolatey and that's all that counts!

This is where I got the original recipe from but I ended up essentially fudging it toward the end. The recipe is for 32 truffles per batch but I only had 24 of each of the 4 types of mould. I also think these moulds hold a smaller volume of chocolate than the balls in the recipe create so I did the following

200g chocolate
50ml cream
50ml alcohol

Which worked out at about half the amount that the recipe suggests. I used twice as much alcohol as I found that 25ml didn't result in much flavour even in a full batch so these chocolates really do pack a punch!

The 4 varieties I made were
Rum, Baileys, Orange and Strawberry.

The Rum (old vatted Demerara), Baileys and Strawberry (Smirnoff vodka and monin strawberry syrup) were all half and half (dark chocolate and milk) and the orange (Cointreau) used dark chocolate. We got moulds from Lakeland, I love the orange and strawberry ones, they give such good detail on the chocs.

I think they look pretty cute in there little packages, we had hoped that they would be able to stack on top pf each other in the cellophane but it was a little narrow and too faffy.