On this day 17 years ago ....

... James and I had our first proper 'date'. Until then our relationship had consisted mainly of him flicking ice-cubes at me in a pub.

On May 18th 1992, at approx 19:00, when he came to collect me in his Mum's car, to take me to the cinema, two things struck me:
1. rather than the black, metal band T-shirts I was used to seeing him dressed in, he was wearing a plain white T-shirt and blue jeans, and ...
2. he smelled nice.

God loves a trier...and so do I. So I kept him.

Before you start panicking, this is not going to be a minute by minute account of our relationship and I do have a legitimate craft-based reason for mentioning our anniversary.

After being together through 16 Christmases, 34 birthdays, numerous anniversaries and the occasional 'just because' .... you begin to run out of original gift ideas - we're both extremely fortunate to have everything we need , so the only port of call is finding something that we like. Which is where shopping online for arty gifts comes in.

I bought him this print from http://www.presentandcorrect.com/ because like me, he is a tea addict.

Despite me not having bought him a frame to put it in [oops!] he did like it and expressed his approval by stating: "You can't go too far wrong with a print of a custard cream." There's nothing I can add to that.

His gift to me was this handmade doll from Cathy Cullis's 'novembermoon' etsty shop:

[Image from Cathy Cullis]

He's aptly named Pointy Hat Chap, and it was love at first sight [between Pointy Hat Chap and I, not me and James!] after I saw him in this line-up of Cathy's dolls on her Flickr gallery:

The line-up took me back to all of the class photos taken at school where mine was always the smallest, hardest to find figure. Identifying my whereabouts in a group-shot is the equivalent of searching through the pages of a Where's Wally? book! I just couldn't resist having this tiny kindred spirit come to live with me.

So, after 17 years together we're all cups of tea and hand-made dolls. Not sure if our heavy-metal-T-shirt-wearing -younger selves would have predicted that!

:)