A Princess Themed Wedding

A local customer contacted me recently with a special request. Her "baby" cousin, who is a keen scrapbooker, just got married. She had a Disney princess themed wedding. My customer wanted to give her a framed papercut picture of the couple on their wedding day. "She will love your stuff!" she wrote to me.

My customer sent me a bunch of photos from the couple's big day so that I could see the blonde-haired bride's dress with all its beautiful ruffles and flowers, and the groom's black suit. I noted the colours of the peach and pink flowers and the wedding cake - complete with prince and princess! My customer wanted me to include a castle in the picture as well and lots of flowers and animals too. She also wanted the couple's names, Bati and Bezalel, the date of their wedding, 12.29.2019 and the words "Happily Ever After" somewhere in the picture.

It was time to get sketching!

I drew, then cut from paper, the young couple standing in front of a pink turreted castle. Fluffy white clouds and trees can be seen on the horizon, whilst a little brown squirrel and a grey rabbit line the path where the bride and groom stand. A banner embellished with flowers in the front of the picture declares that this is their "Happily Ever After".

I loved working on this large piece, which measures 30x40cm. My customer seemed thrilled with it too, saying that it was "stunning!" She later posted the following recommendation for my work in our local Facebook group:

"Unsolicited recommendation for Lisa Isaacs who made this picture for our cousins' wedding! It was the perfect personalised gift for their Disney princess themed wedding! They absolutely loved it!"
It seems that the bride and groom were very happy with it too. Apparently the bride was still texting her cousin to tell her how much she loved the picture several days later!

* This post has been shared on Little Things Thursday, Creatively Crafty, Thursday Favorite Things, Welcome To The Weekend Link Up, All Seasons, Inspire Me Monday and Make It Pretty Monday.

Ashkelon International Sand Sculpture Festival

Back in August I drove south to see the Ashkelon International Sand Sculpture Festival. The coastal city of Ashkelon was hosting the festival, which featured the work of 10 artists from around the world, for the first time. Sand sculptures apparently need a special, gritty sand whose grains hold together and 2,000 tonnes of this specialist sand had been brought to Ashkelon's Bar Kokhba beach to create an array of giant sculptures of characters from famous children's fairy tales. Together with friends, I had a lovely time checking them all out.

Many of the characters featured were instantly recognisable. Sculptures included Cinderella, above, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, below, and several other classic fairy tale characters. All of them were made of hundreds of tons of sand.

Montserrat Cuesta Marin and Sergio Ramírez Pérez, sand sculptors from Spain, came to Ashkelon to contribute to the festival. They created a huge sculpture of Gulliver, the protagonist from Jonathan Swift's famous novel "Gulliver's Travels". Made from 380 tons of sand and standing two metres high and nine metres long, it was quite possibly the largest sculpture at the festival. Other sculptors arrived from Indonesia, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Russia, the USA and the Czech Republic, to make their elaborate fairy tale images.

Now a little bit of history. The city of Ashkelon has been known for its strategic importance throughout history, and indeed since pre-history. The Canaanites established an international market there; battles occurred between the Crusaders and the Fatimids in Ashkelon; the Greeks came, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the British, and then the Israelis. It is a city with so much history.
The name Ashkelon is probably western Semitic and may be derived from the triliteral root shkl, "to weigh", perhaps attesting to Ashkelon's importance as a centre for commercial activities. Scallion and shallot are words derived from the Latin Ascalonia, which was how the Romans named the town. In the Ashkelon National Park today, there is a vegetable plot where they're growing shallots retrogressively, hoping to culture them back to the original vegetable once again.

On this occasion I did not visit Ashkelon to learn about its history but rather to see the sand sculpture festival and to hang out at the lovely Bar Kokhba beach (Simon bar Kokhba was the leader of what is known as the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire in 132 CE, establishing an independent Jewish state which he ruled for three years). The festival ran for a week, with activities and shows on the promenade in the evenings, though we visited during the day when the sun was hotter but the crowds were smaller.

* This post has been shared on Little Things Thursday, All Seasons and Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday).