High Stakes and High Society

I went to Ascot yesterday with my closest and oldest friend Mel. It was an amazing day, and we thoroughly enjoyed a bit of glamour! Here are a few images from our day.

As always my visits to London begin in the same way- a gingerbread latte and a book on the train on way down....

....needless to say the beverages got somewhat stronger as the weekend drew on....

One of the best bits about Ascot has to be the excuse to get dressed up, and the opportunity to don either an enormous or an unusual hat.  Susannah and I spent a few weeks discussing what hat and dress I should wear, and she persuaded me that I should make the hat I kept talking about.  It was constructed from a 7 inch vinyl record and various millinery materials- so I did and here it is.  I shall be doing a post this week about that hat and a few pictures of the process of constructing it.

 We arrived just in time for the Royal procession around the racecourse, however due the number of enormous hats we didn't actually see anything, as you can see from the picture below!

As well as my vinyl record hat, I wore a repro 1950s style dress and carried one of my Grandma's old 1960s Kelly bags (which inevitably burst open leading to a lost phone... luckily a kind Australian lady returned it to me, otherwise it had the potential to ruin the day!)  And you can see Mel's beautiful white fascinator hat in these pictures that she got from John Lewis which she wore with a gorgeous sea blue Reiss dress. 

I have always had mixed feelings about horse racing but I did love the day and had a little flutter on a couple of the races.  We did win one race- we bet £5 on the favourite Black Caviar and our winnings yielded a grand total of 83 pence. 

 

We had such an amazing weekend, and it was great to get a break.  I am so pleased to have been able to share the experience with Mel, as this is something we have wanted to do since we were about twelve years old.  Certainly a weekend full of memories to remember.

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