When it came to commemorating our engagement party, Monsieur H and I wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary.
So on the night of the party, we scattered some small, blank canvases across a sideboard near the heart of the action, and asked our guests to leave us a message.
We thought we’d get a nice collection of our friend’s names in their own handwriting, or a smattering of five different ways of depicting “good luck!” in various fonts, which could work well in a collage-type wall hanging later.
But what resulted surprised even us.
Such careful, thoughtful drawings of our favourite memories with our closest friends.
Scribbles of travel adventures and stand-out parties. Funny or sentimental recounts of when these friendships started and how they grew. Screen-shots of explosive laughter, inside jokes, unruly shenanigans. Moments of connection, shared experience, united values; frozen in time in blue water colour and black texta.
What began as an idea for a quasi replica of our numbers painting, with guests’ names and brief words providing a repeated structure with which to create a pattern painting, became instead an unprecedented quilt of memories.
An overwhelming recount of the love that has blanketed both our lives before we were a Maison H&H, and after.
What privilege, what absolute joy, to have these magnificent people in our lives.
Long after the party was over, we pieced the small canvases together on a piece of large board, and sprinkled pictures of our engagement and the party itself throughout.
Now it hangs above our dining room table, so that whenever we have friends over we can look up at it and reminisce about all the crazy, fun, sentimental moments that life has already thrown our way, and all of the memories yet to come.
Maison H&H 
