Three Years in the Making

My husband and I just celebrated our first wedding anniversary and third anniversary together on Thursday. Since our first anniversary as a couple, we have been taking a picture every year. The next year, we take a picture holding the previous year's picture. Now that we're three years in, it's starting to come together nicely!

My advice to anyone who decides to do this is to start with a larger picture! An 8x10 starts to look really small after a couple years. I didn't want to change it now, though, because I like consistency.I'm very pleased with it, though. Each year I put the new picture into the frame and move the old picture to an album.

On our first anniversary as a couple, my then-fiancé and I wrote letters to each other. Then, without reading them, we put them in the middle of a little bottle of rocks to be opened on our first anniversary as a married couple.

Two years later, it was so much fun to see what we predicted our lives would be like! There were also some very sweet words in those letters, and I definitely teared up a bit. I'm going to keep the contents of those letters private, but here's a picture of the little jar next to our tradition photo.

We chose not to save the top tier of our wedding cake, like many couples do. Something about eating year-old frozen cake didn't sound at all appealing to either of us (not knocking those who do it! I just barely like cake as it is). Instead, we went to the same bakery and the same cake decorator made us a scaled-down version of our wedding cake. It was absolutely perfect! She even made us a tiny, dark chocolate cake topper! That was a nice touch since we were so busy at our wedding that we forgot all about the cake topper...

All in all it was an incredible first wedding anniversary. Reece and I went to Branson and had a lot of fun. I am so lucky to have such an amazing man in my life, and look forward to the many years we have ahead of us!

Invitation Ornament

From the moment I saw it on Pinterest, I knew I had to make this ornament! That was back before I even had wedding invitations made. Now, six months after our wedding, I finally made it! I followed the tutorial by the lovely Christy. You should definitely check out her post (and the rest of her blog as well).

Our wedding had a black and white damask color scheme, and I'm really happy that it came through in the ornament. I added a little heart charm and tied the top with a lace ribbon, and I am so pleased with how it came out. If you look closely, you can see my old last name, the word marriage, and his last name. I was definitely nervous that none of the important pieces would show through as I was cramming bits of paper into the ornament! I think it's great, though, and it's a fantastic way to save one of our invitations. What do you think?