A Celebration and an Excuse to Dress Up

I went to Bristol at the weekend, a very lively and buzzy city which also happened to be hosting the annual Bristol Balloon Fiesta so it was even livelier and buzzier than usual.   However if you are interested you can see better photos than I could take if you follow the link.  Instead, I took a photo (from the upper window of a museum) of this guy who set himself up with a manual typewriter and a chalkboard sign offering to type a poem for you after asking a few questions about your life.  The man standing next to me said it reminded him of a similar thing he’d once experienced in India where people would pay somebody to write letters for them if they were unable to do so themselves.  My attempts at poetry are rubbish (and therefore non-existent) but I didn’t indulge.  Just found it fascinating.  Would you have asked him to type a poem for you?

Anyway, I didn’t go to Bristol for the balloon fiesta.  Our daughter turned 30 last weekend and she threw a party with a 1920s theme.  The venue was in an old building with a 1920s décor so was the perfect choice.  She invited us, her parents, or did I invite us I can’t quite remember.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a dog sitter for an overnight stay so Mr Tialys had to stay behind and I went with my sister-in-law who is the favourite aunty.

All the ‘youngsters’ wore very similar flapper dresses  which looked great but, as mother of the birthday girl,  I opted for a less glitzy (and less revealing) one – it still had sequins and beads but in the same colour as the dress  – and my SIL had a long elegant dress with long black gloves, long cigarette holder and headband.

                                                                                  Me & the SIL

I hate having my photo taken and am totally useless at selfies so I surprised my daughter by making full use of the ‘photo booth’ she’d installed in a corner where you could go and pose as seriously or madly as you wished, sometimes aided by props.  The more alcohol ingested the sillier the photos became – not that I over indulged as I find I am unable to cope with even the slightest hangover these days.

                                                                     With the Birthday Girl

She got her boyfriend to fix it so that nobody (by which she mainly meant me) was able to fiddle with the results from the camera in order to delete anything they didn’t like.

He’s ‘in the business of IT’ so produced a really good video of a collection of photos with a 1920s style soundtrack which is a lot of fun and will make a nice record of her party to look  back on.  You can hire more complicated set ups but this one was literally an iPad mounted on a tripod with a ring light installed above it and whatever he had done to make it do the photo booth thing. 

They had a more sophisticated setting at the wedding reception we attended recently but I didn’t know any of the other guests so didn’t use it.  I would recommend it though, if you have a special event coming up, as it was certainly something that was well used, people had fun and I think the results were quite good.

I wanted to put some of the photos in a post so I know where to find them when I want to reminisce rather than plough through my really badly organised photo folders on my laptop.

Have you been to an event where they had a similar photo booth thingy going on?  Did you use it or were you too shy?  Would you consider having one at a future celebration? Not that I’m in the business of hiring out the equipment or anything – just interested.