On Bedspreads and Whizzers

As those of you who read the last post will know, this week it has been our seventh Wedding Anniversary, so I thought you might bear just a little more blogging on the subject of marriage (it is in the subtitle after all). This year my Mum gave us the most marvellous present – a bedspread she had handmade for us, using fabric left over from making my wedding dress and the dresses of my six bridesmaids – so, seven colours in all. Here is the bedspread, installed and looking very splendid!

However, as most of you reading this won’t actually have been at the wedding since I didn’t even know many of you back then, I thought I’d fill in just a little background for you. What follows is an edited extract from an article I wrote for our wedding brochure.

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“Oh, how marvellous, a rainbow wedding!” exclaimed one of the guests when I told her what my wedding colour scheme was going to be. Indeed, the colours you see before you are the colours of the rainbow (as close as I could get them in readily available fabrics and ribbons), but my reasons for choosing these colours go beyond simply wishing to create a joyful and flamboyant effect with lots of bridesmaids!

First, red is not the traditional colour for a wedding dress. However, I have never even considered getting married wearing white (or ivory or cream or magnolia etc). Those of you who know me well know that I have always loved red, that I feel comfortable wearing red, and that red is the typical ‘Me’ colour. Furthermore, a red dress is infinitely more practical than a white one – it will cope with beer, red wine and general grubbiness much better and, once the train and sleeves are removed, will be a super concert dress and ball gown for many years to come.

Red is also the colour of the ruby in my engagement ring. Just as I was always going to have a red wedding dress, so I was also going to have a ruby engagement ring (the ruby in this case is flanked by two diamonds). Ruby is also my birthstone.

Furthermore, I have always loved the different colours of the spectrum (the rainbow) and spent many hours as a child colouring in rainbow patterns and making ‘whizzers’. Whizzers were discs of card, divided up like a pie, with each slice coloured in a different colour of the rainbow. When they were spun very fast on a piece of string, they looked (almost) white. Amazing!!!

The mystery of how whizzers worked was solved when I did O-level physics. I learnt how a glass prism splits white light into its constituent colours (in just the same way as rain splits up sunlight to make a rainbow). The different colours that make up white light are refracted (bent) to different extents as they pass from air to glass (or air to water). Incidentally, if you ever need to know which end of the spectrum is refracted most on passing from one medium to another, remember: ‘red refracts rubbish’ and ‘blue bends best’!

So my second reason for the colour scheme comes from my interest in the colours of the spectrum. Although my dress is red, my bridesmaids are wearing the other colours of the rainbow. If we could be made into a ‘whizzer’ we would indeed create traditional wedding white!

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And here we all are, not being whizzed round (thank goodness) but posing for a photograph!