Hi everybody!
One very windy day last week David and I walked up the hill to the place where we got married (almost two weeks ago now). We wanted to take some photos of our wedding pocket watches. We bought ourselves a new camera the day before because our old Nikon D80 had been falling apart for quite some time and the day before the wedding it just broke. Since we have been wanting a new one for a while we took that as a sign and went and bought the Nikon D7000 that we'd been drooling over for quite some time.
I have been taking less and less photos with the old camera because it wasn't working as good anymore and that just took all the fun out of it. But now! Oh my, now I'm all back to taking lots and lots of photos again. This is one lovely camera. We are still learning but I think you already can see an improvement in crispness and clarity.
Well, enough talking about the camera: Let's start on the pocket watches instead!

As many of you probably know already David and I chose to have engagement rings in wood, made by the lovely people at Stout Woodworks. In Sweden it's custom for both the man and woman to get an engagement ring. At the wedding only the woman gets a new ring that she will engrave and the man will engrave his engagement ring. Since we weren't able to engrave our wooden rings and I didn't really want another ring we thought we could do something different as a sort of memory to keep and have engraved.
A pocket watch is beautiful, perfect to engrave and as a gift it sort of symbols that you give the person you love your time as well as a pretty object.

We started to look at ebay, esty and different antique shops everywhere we went. We quickly found that we both really liked the pocket watches in the early 1900's art deco style, preferable with arabic numbers instead of roman. They are so gorgeous in design, clean and simple but still with something extra. Like coloured hands, symbols along the edge, different materials and texture.
David found his in an antique shop one day in may and I found mine on ebay shortly after. We won it without anyone else bidding and the seller had described it really well with lots of pictures and details. It was in a great condition!

The watch arrived when I was in Scotland the first time and to our great dismay it wasn't working. David went to a watch maker close to our house and asked them if they could see what the problem was and if the watch was newly broken or if it had been like that for a long time. They couldn't really help without taking it in for a closer look and then we would have to pay them much more money than we bought the watch for in the first place.
David sent an email to the guy selling the clock and he was super helpful and repaid us directly and asked us to return it so that he could see what the problem was, because it was working when he sent it away.
I was so sad because I'd already fallen in love with the watch and to find something similar would be so very hard and time consuming.

A week or so later we got an email from the seller and he had found the problem. The watch was highly magnetic, probably from getting stuck in customs and their x-ray machines. Apparently easy to fix!
He asked if we wanted to buy the clock again, for a lower price, and hope for it to arrive in better condition this time. Of course!
Before he was going to send it though he wanted to carry it around in his pocket for a week to see if it wasn't sensitive to movement just to make sure.
We crossed our fingers and waited.
And then he wrote us to let us know it was working perfectly and he could send it, in a metal tin this time. We didn't have to pay him anything until it arrived and was working.
Isn't that amazing customer service!?!
It got caught in customs again and we held our breath.
One day it was here and it was working! Hurray!
I don't think you can understand how happy I was. This watch had already started to mean so much to me. It was my wedding watch. No other would have worked.

So by july we had our watches and the next step was to find somebody who could engrave them. It seemed like every engraver in Gothenburg was on vacation and couldn't do it before we left for Österlen.
Some of them didn't even want to do it becuase they were nervous of working on our old watches.
Luckily we found one that promised to have it ready in time.
When we came home from Glasgow our watches waited for us, newly engraved and ready for the wedding.

I wore mine in a short chain for the wedding but I want to have it in a longer one for everyday use because it's not really clever to have a watch in a way that makes it hard to read the time...

David had his in this chain for the ceremony but he is going to find a pocket watch chain so that he can keep the watch in his pocket instead.

At the moment in the ceremony when the wedding couple usually exchange rings we exchanged watches instead. It was really emotional when we hung the watches around each others' necks. I cried, obviously (I am a big cryer in emotional situations).

And here you can see my wooden ring as well.

My husband!!
One of the few photos I have of David smiling. He prefers to stay behind the camera so usually when I take photos of him he sort of looks really annoyed or he's making a funny face.

(Like in the picture of him a few photos above this when he thought he was smiling. HAHAHAHAHAH! No, that's not a smile. THIS is smile!)

Here you can see the inscription in the back. This is David's watch but mine is the same.
The date, our names and then Vi hör ihop, du och jag which means We belong together, you and me.
Words that mean a lot to us since we have quite the love story with us being a couple when we were 11 years old for the first time.
I think I will tell you that story some other day.

And now some silly and/or cute photos of us taken with the cameras' self timer:

I hope you liked to see and read about our pocket watches. I've been wearing mine almost every day since the wedding because I love it so much. It's really a token of sorts, and that was what we wanted.

I made such a marvellous vintage find when David and I were in Glasgow. A nurse cape from 1976 in dark blue and bright red. It's warm and amazingly beautiful and I feel like I've found a real treasure! Since I bought it I've been dreaming of different photoshoots with the cape. One of them was to bring it into the woods during dusk and capture light and dark, motion and stillness. And more than a touch of scary.
So we did just that. And this is the result.

Ticklish fear all down your spine. To meet this person on your late night walk through the forest. Should you say hi, or should you turn around and run.
Is it too late to decide?

We're having the laziest, loveliest honeymoon ever. Doing nothing but lovely things and calling eachother husband and wife in as many ways as our launguage skills make possible.
Like every time we are here I get the urge to write so I've been doing a bit of that too. Writing comes in waves for me. For quite a long time I've been writing less and taking photos more. That's just how it is and I need to do what I am passionate about whatever it happens to be in that moment.
But lately I've been longing to write so I'm trying to embrace that now.

Here's a little text I wrote about our honeymoon picnic by the beach the other day. It's in swedish but google translate made quite a good work of parts of it, if just a bit surreal. (apparently it doesn't know about whiny thermoses, egg sandwiches and sun warmed forts.)

/Lotta

Hello, hello, hello!
I am so very very married!
Last saturday David and I had our wedding and it was the most magical day ever. We had planned for it to be a relaxed and joyful day without stress and rules. And that was exactly what it was! And so much better than we could have ever imagined.
It was a sunny day, but the clouds were dangerously dark around the time for the ceremony. No reason for worry, though. All those clouds just made for dramatic skies in the photographs and the day kept on in a sunny fashion.
I OF COURSE had my iPhone with me and so I documented parts of the preparations. Some of those photos you will see here but many of these are taken by our friends and their smartphones. I've edited most of them with the VSCOCam app (Love it!) except for some of them that's edited by the person who took the photo.
We had a few friends take pictures with fancy cameras too and you will get to see them too but for now: hope you enjoy a little peek at our wedding day.
David and Lotta. August 24 2013.

The day started with preparations. Inger, a dear friend of my family, helped with the table decorations.
Yes, it's a green house. Yes, this is where the dinner and party was held. Lovely, isn't it?

My mother was in charge of the flowers. We had picked them along the roads close to where we have our house in Rörum. Wild flowers and straws and some roses from our garden.

The view from the wedding couples' seat.

Decorations in 3D...

I walked up to the place of the ceremony to wipe off spider webs and bird poop from the chairs that we had brought there the day before. It was such a weird and lovely feeling to be up there all alone only a few hours before the wedding ceremony. I stood there for a few minutes and looked at the view and tried to imagine what it would feel like when it was happening four hours later. I felt such a calm and excited feeling and skipped down the hill to do the last of the preparations in the green house before it was time for me to be dolled up by my friend Johanna.

And here we are! Our friends and family had gathered in our garden for drinks and snacks and we had time to walk around and say hi to everybody before it was time to march together up the hill.

Hello!

David and I took the longer way because my dress prevented me from climbing the wooden stairs over the fence. Our guests looked like lemmings in the distance.

All of our guests made it to the top!

Here we are, soon on top of the hill!
And this is how you carry a very large tulle dress when walking up a hill surrounded by sheep poo.

We met up with Else-Beth who was going to marry us.

And then it was time to start.

I couldn't keep from crying. It was just too emotional standing there, at that beautiful place with all our favourite people around us, hand in hand with my David.

And then we exchanged pocket watches. We didn't exchange any rings because we are happy with our wooden engagement rings. Instead we had bought antique pocket watches and engraved them in the back (You will see more of them in another post).
This was such a lovely moment, filled with joy. And both of us managed to lock the chains around each other's necks without any problems!

And David gets his pocket watch too.

And we're married!

I love these photos so much! It looks like we're standing in a painting and that is exactly how it feels up there.

After the ceremony we made mojitos for everybody and people sat down on blankets to enjoy the view and the company. And I was back to taking photos again, haha!

This is Ida, Christian, Aili and Jonas. Lovely people! Aili and Jonas were our wedding witnesses, by the way.

Joel, Olle and Maja looking good in the sunshine.

My sister and niece Hilda.

Me, my sister and nephew Alfred. And my husband (!) lurking around in the background.

Then it was time to walk down the hill again. David and I took the longer way again and I had a bag of ice over my shoulder. Lots of skirt to carry!

We took photos of all our guests with the polaroid camera. And one of us too, of course.

In the green house before dinner!
Johanna made my hair and makeup. The flower crown is made by me and the dress was made by the amazing Jennie Lööf.

This is our wedding cake.
An enormous Kanelbulle (cinnamon bun) as a tribute to my all time favourite movie Äppelkriget that was filmed in this very part of Sweden and where a car motor magically turns into a giant cinnamon bun...

The bride gets to break the cake!

And the night came and lots of colourful lamps and candles lit up the beautiful greenhouse.
We ate the most amazing food you could ever imagine, all made of food from the farm we were on.
We danced to our favourite music mixed with some hits from the early 1990's since David and I was a couple then for the first time.
It was the most amazing day and night and we couldn't be happier.
This will be with us for a very long time.

Now we are husband and wife. YAAY!