Hamper Goodness

I went to a friend (PG) from works wedding back in May.  I wrote about the wonderful food he had here.  Now I'm going to write about the wonderful gift we made him.  We spend a lot of time with PG at work and he sometimes tells us too much about himself.  So far we know that he has a love of hampers (which we think is a bit girly) and he knows more about sewing than he should.  He also is very good at ranting, and we love listening to the things that annoy him (sometimes I think they'd annoy everyone, other times it's just something really funny that only he can find annoying!).

With all of this knowledge we'd been gathering over the last three years, my friend and I decided to make him a hamper.  He supports Pompey FC, and they were playing in the FA Cup Final on his wedding day (they lost) so we managed to get a magnet with the date on.  He's a big James Bond fan, so we stuck some top trumps in too.  He's also a bit of a Eurovision geek, so we added some Eurovision DVD's and badges that we got from ebay.  When they changed the logo of sprite recently, he'd complain every time he saw it (which was quite often as that's all Ian drinks and we have breakfast together every day), so we got a couple of cans of that to add.  At breakfast, PG also has a habit of destroying the stirrer he gets with his tea, so I got a small picture frame, and put one in, with 'In case of emergency break glass' written on it.  He's also very interested in bridges, so we bought a book with lots of bridge pictures in (bridge porn I guess!) but it turns out he already had that one. 

One of the biggest rants PG has ever had was about this other wedding he'd attended where the bride had a brown sash on her wedding dress.  He could not understand it, he complained how horrible it was (I've since seen the photos and I agree, it's really not a good look).  At this same wedding, the napkins that were supplied for the wedding breakfast were paper.  PG seemed outraged that someone would have paper napkins at a wedding.  I agree that it's not very classy, but I don't think I'd be as offended by them if I was in a similar situation.  So, to remind him of these two things, we managed to find some paper napkins with brown stripes! (We didn't want to just put nice things in this hamper after all!).

Now, generally, at a wedding, there is more than one person getting married so we had to put some things in that weren't for PG.  PG's now wife (DL) is also crafty so I chose the most fashionable sewing magazine I could find in WHSmith.  The eurovision gifts were also suitable for DL as she's just as geeky and she also supports pompey.  

As well as all the funny things, we put in several packets of biscuits, some dark chocolate heart lollipops from Hotel Chocolat, some bubbly and glasses.  I spent the day before their wedding making some small hearts out of felt, two of which were embroidered with their initials. 

The hamper all came together nicely, it had a red gingham lining, the hearts were red and white, we'd managed to get some cellophane with red hearts on it, and we had red ribbon round it.  It looked beautiful, and it got a big smile from PG when we arrived at the wedding.