three

What a wonderful roller coaster it's been and a fantastic adventure.  It's all I thought it would be plus so much more.  You can relive the fun that was our wedding here and here

On an interesting note, remember how I wrote THIS disclaimer at end of last year's anniversary post?

"let's just hope next year we're in the same country!"

Well guess who had to go to France for business this week?  Yup!  But no biggie, we're waiting til he gets back (and the detox is over) to celebrate three years of wedded happiness!

Two

Two years, one puppy, thousands of tears, smiles, laughs, decisions, and a move across the world later...

and you know what?

I wouldn't change a thing.

(let's just hope next year we're in the same country!)

Oh Happy Year.

A year ago today Mr. Bama & I said "I do" in front of about 90 friends and family.  One year, a new city, a pupster and hundreds of adventures later, I couldn't be happier that I married my best friend and man of my dreams.  Heres to the past year and, God willing, 50+ more.  You can take a walk down memory lane by checking out pictures from the ceremony here and the reception here.

My life as of right now...

I'm in a wedding wonderland!

In all honesty though, I'm in crunch time trying to get a wedding invite suite assembled for a client and ready to be mailed before the end of the week.  Our kitchen table and peninsula has been overtaken by hills of chocolate inner tri-fold pockets and valleys of light pink envelopes. I can't remember the last time we actually ate at the dinner table, quite frankly.  That plus I was asked by one of my best friends from High School to design her Save the Dates  (yippee!) before the end of the month, makes for a very, very busy Mrs. Bama.  I will be back with a  full rundown of my blink-and-you-missed-it, yet still much needed trip back to VB sooner rather than later.

Til I pull myself out of wedding world and back into the blogosphere - have a fabulous week!

Why I love working for myself

I feel like a proud mother sending her child off to college:  After a month of collaboration with a wonderful bride -to-be, my first invitation suite for a client is done and ready to be addressed and mailed!  So here we go:

I had to blur out the names of my clients, for obvious privacy reasons.  But you can still get the overall design cohesiveness

it is a 6.75 x 4.75 top layer mounted on a 7x5 peice of colbalt blue cardstock, giving the invite much more dimension and substance

The invite with its accompanied map.  all of the important info is blurred out again

tucked in all pretty in pink!

wrapped up with the one pound design signature Fleur de Lis

ready to be given to the bride to be! (what do you do when you have a ton of curling ribbon left from your own wedding?  use to spiffy up packaging)

the picture i did fail to take before shipping everything off was the invite & map stuffed in their envelopes. We had a classic stark white inner envelope, put into a green envelope that was the exact green used in the invitation design.  I would have loved to have been able to come up with a label design for the bride, but a budget is a budget and the bride often has an idea of her own -- that when the designer leaves it up to the DIY genius of her brides.  It was the one factor I LOVED about all of my wedding vendors - they encouraged DIY and something I will encourage with all of my clients!

one thing my bride did request was thank yous - and here they are, ready for the new couple's post-honeymoon T-Y writing campaign

 Phew!  I think I have an addiction to the "rush" that completing projects gives me.  I kind of cannot wait to see what these look like after mailing (the bride to be is also a friend of my husbands, so we'll be getting an invite as well). Now onto the next exciting project!

reception visual candy

Ta da! Pictures from the reception. For fear of wedding overkill (it has been over a month!) I've posted some of the best photos that our wedding photog and some guests took. enjoy!

The Currituck Club in Corolla, where we had our Reception

cocktail hour!

if you have a reception at a golf club - you must have the driving range open!

a pretty day in september

Here's some of the gorgeous ceremony pictures that we received from our photographer:

If you're planning on getting married in Eastern North Carolina or Virginia, I highly recommend our wonderful photographer, Neil Thurston. You can also check out his website at http://www.neilgt.com/. He was wonderful, easy going, very professional, and as you can see, does absolutely stunning work!

some wedding sneak peeks

Here are some of our favorite photos taken by a few of our guests at the wedding - the photographer's pics will be coming soon!

More to come soon!

Be Our Guest!

When you have a largely destination wedding, you tend to have pretty much 99.9% of your guests stay at a hotel/rental home. So, in order to let our guests know how much we really do appreciate them travelling to the outer banks (esp in this fabulous economy), we've made some welcome bags for our guests. We wanted to not only have the bag be something that indicated "you're on vacation!" but was also very utilitarian and reusable (especially since 2 weeks ago plastic shopping bags were outlawed on the Outer Banks). So after a month or so of searching we found these awesome totes:

(photo courtesey of cheaptotes.com)

we purchased 50 of the navy for $50... awesome! Then it was time to figure out what goodies we were going to put in the bags.

So here are the contents:

- 1 or 2 bottles of wine.

Either Whalehead White, Wild Pony Pink or Sunset Red. My mom and I spent a whole afternoon doing these labels because we're both artsy, graphics nerds.

- 1 or 2 plastic wine glasses

- 1 travel sized bottle of Sunscreen. More proof that we're artsy nerds (also, just watch it be raining that whole weekend.. sweet)

- 1 travel guide to Corolla

- Timeline of events

- 1 bag of Bama boy's mom's citrus cookies. The woman can bake, i kid you not

- 1 or 2 bags of goldfish snacks (get it... beach, water, fish. Ok I'll stop)

- a few bottles of water

- travel sized kleenex, because you just never know.

and thats it!

heres everything complied together:

and all of the bags ready to be delivered for our many guests:

and on another note: my bridesmaids will all be here in less than 18 hours. I am S-T-O-K-E-D