one year.

We've been married for one full year! Three hundred and sixty five days. Or as my husband (of one year!!) would tell you, 1 trip around the sun together! :)
Did you know paper is the traditional first year wedding gift?! Weeks before our actual anniversary we were talking about trying to do a paper gift for one another, I was having next to no success (lotto tickets? I hit the jackpot marrying you?! ... too cheesy). However, Thomas had a great idea but needed help executing it. So that is exactly what we did on our anniversary.  :)

I love this-- SO much!! It turned out so well. :) 

I think my favorite part of it is that our poster of the sun is actually one of those motivational posters. We cracked up when we purchased the biggest SUCCESS motivational poster we could find so we could cut it down. It turned out so well and I'm so happy to have this fun piece of art to remember our one year anniversary.

Another tradition I wanted to start is that I want us to take a picture every year of us sitting on our living room couch. I think it will be so great to have these as little time capsules and memories of our years together. We started it this year and I so love this little tradition already!

It was a great day. 

Oh, and I got roses too :) 

knitting!

You guys. I actually finished a knitting project!! Like for real finished! Weaved my ends in and everything!! 

I'm so proud of this baby blanket!! And I know a certain little miss is going to love it too! :) 

And it's a good thing I'm on a knitting kick, because this happened this weekend: 

Here's hoping my little nephew will get his, you know.. before August hits because you clearly need a blanket in the heat of summer. :) 

spring please?

I'm so ready. I want skirts and summer dresses! and sunshine! and warmth! I'm ready to complain about the southern humidity and the 90 degree heat!!

but no. I had a brief taste of 70 degrees and now we're back to forty degrees. It snowed  earlier this week. SNOWED! Nothing stuck of course, but flakes fell from the skies and shocked me and my entire office! 

Thankfully my mama is getting me ready for spring (you finished yours yet mama?).

Seriously! How cute?

My mama bought me this cute paper flower wreath kit from Paper-Source for my birthday and I'm so happy she did!! Although it took way longer than I expected, but it was fun to have a mindless craft for a Sunday afternoon. :) 

It helps that it turned out just. so. darn. cute! 

Here's hoping it will bring me more spring like weather!!  

I've gone a little crazy.

So clearly I've gone a bit crazy.. but I'm admitting it so that's okay right? Two weeks after Christmas I found this craft on one of my favorite blogs, bowerpowerblog.com and I just had to do it! Plus it was January and I was a suffering from Christmas withdrawals so clearly making Christmas decorations for next year is what cures the Christmas blues.

But seriously how can you NOT love him? I'm already so excited to bring him out in 11 months!

Can't wait big guy. 

can't. wait.

The concept was simple. I gridded out the printed off image with one inch squares and then with a bit of math I figured out that each square on my 20x20 canvas was just about 3 inches. (Mama I've realized that I've completely lost you, which is why I'm currently making you yours right now! xo!)
Then it was just a process of drawing the same square on the printed off image, but bigger on the canvas.

I'm not going to lie, when I was done tracing it all out, I was a bit nervous-- it looked nothing like the cool pop art santa that I loved so much.. he looked deformed and weird and my confidence in this project was sinking fast.

Until I broke out the metallic sharpies and started coloring him in.

Here's the moment when it all started turing around and I started falling in love..

I'm seriously SO happy with how it turned out! 

I love him so much! 

ho. ho. HO! 

Ahoy!

Ahoy! It's a boy! 

Jenny had such a cute shower over the weekend that I just had to share 

some pictures of her adorable nautical themed shower. 

           

 

There was cute crafty whale decorations 

smiling babies!

        

An ADORABLE cake and some really excited Grandma's-to-be. 

some crazy crafty homemade presents! 

And of course, LOTS of whale themed gifts! 

          

 

we're so excited to meet this little man! 

a whale of a time.

My sister-in law is having a baby in March, and we're SO excited to meet our future little nephew
and become Aunt Kay Kay and Uncle Tom Tom. :) 

Jenny had her baby shower this past weekend and even though we already purchased her gift, I saw this pin on pinterset and since they're decorating the nursery in a nautical whale theme I just HAD to make this for her.

I loved the simplicity of this painting. I was too afraid to free hand the whale with paint so I sketched out my whale and carefully painted the outline of this canvas in the navy color I picked out. 

              

The hardest part of this little craft project was letting my canvases dry so I could paint the spout of water. I'm so happy with how it turned out and I just LOVE it. 

And the best part is that Jenny loved it too! 

we can pickle that.

My friend Lara is a canner. A hardcore, let’s can everything kind of canner. And truth be told, I’m starting to get the canning bug.

We hit up the local farmers market with canning on the brain. Canning was on the brain, but I mean c’mon, how could I have passed up these beautiful flowers?!

So yea, they came home with us too. 

Lara makes these amazing pickled green beans, or as she calls them, dilly beans. And they are seriously out of this world. Those were my only request for our canning Saturday. 

We also accomplished blackberry peach jam and some yummy corn salsa. And shockingly EVERY thing we canned sealed!! Now I want to can everything not only do I need more dilly beans in my life, but tomatoes are on my list next! Perhaps once this wedding madness and work slows down a bit I’ll turn into a canning machine.

ummm and thanks again mama for all you hand me down canning goods! :)

our wedding invitations.

Now that all our invitations are out and in the hands of our guest I can finally share all the details! Well not all of them because I'm sure I would bore you with my new found love for fonts! Who would have figured that one out?
This was fun. There might have been some rough patches in the mix but overall I loved making our wedding invitations. The map of course is easily my favorite.

I had a few moments where Thomas looked at me like I was a bit crazy.. for example the printer. We sure bonded during this experience and all in all she did well and didn't fail me, (although I killed the yellow ink prettttttty fast) but we had some margin issues. It caused me to not only babysit and fed the printer one by one, but then I went back and trimmed both the invitations and the maps once they were printed (this would be the moments when Thomas looked at me like I was crazy, until I showed him the side by side comparison, there's truth in those pesky details).

Surprisingly I found it oddly therapeutic.  

And I mean, come on.. they look so much better with out that 1/4 of a inch on the top. 

 

It took a good couple of weeks for me to cut all the paper and print everything off-- I did it all in hour spurts after work and on the weekends. It was during this time that I realized I had no idea how I was going to compile them all. Lucky for me I have a mama and some friends to bounce some ideas off of and I landed on the grey envelops and the pretty flower paper that I love so much. My friend Lara came up with the sticker idea which was perfect and gave it that pop of yellow I wanted. They turned into pretty little packages for all our guests to open and I love that. 

Last weekend I dragged all my paper goods up to Ohio and we sat at the table and wrapped our pretty invitations. I really didn't think it was going to take all that long, but it ended up taking us a good chunk of time! And we were all soooo happy that I didn't go with my mama's idea of tissue paper.. oof. 

Here they all are stamped and ready to go! 

It felt weird just leaving them all. I had spend so many evenings and hours working on them that I was (and still am) oddly attached to them.. ha. It was a lot of fun and thanks to Pinterest I did add some fun addresses to the mix.. including: The President and The First Lady, along with Cinderella and Prince Charming. :) Here's hoping we get something fun!!