I might have been a little hard on ourselves in my last post.  I fully realize that if fighting over building a paper towel holder is our biggest problem, we have it pretty damn good.  So, to bring it back to sunshine and rainbows over here I thought I’d share one of our gifts from our 1st wedding anniversary, which we celebrated at the end of August. 

I thought about it this week because this time last year we were one week out from leaving for our honeymoon on an island in Mexico, (we waited a couple months in the hope that we could trade some crappy Ohio weather for sun and beaches).

While Mike has always been the one to like more personal photos, (photos of actual people – ourselves, family, friends), there is so much love and happiness when I remember our wedding and the fun we had on Isla Mujeres that I’ve been adding pictures from those events into our living room. 

I think there’s a balance needed when adding personal photos from one event into our décor.  I’m not a fan of giant canvases with wedding photos taking up an entire wall.  It looks relevant for maybe the first year or so, but after awhile the marriage becomes more important than the wedding.  Obviously, this is all personal taste, so you do you, but, I like to add our wedding photos in less obvious ways.  I’ve added the above photo of Isla Mujeres in our gallery wall in the living room, along with some wedding photos. 

They aren’t the main focus, but every once in a while I will look at one of them and remember what an awesome day that was!  I’ll also be able to switch them out more easily when other important things are documented.

But back to our 1st anniversary…

I usually go big for holidays with gifts, and paper seemed right up my alley.  I made hundreds of homemade paper flowers for our wedding for pete sakes!  But, we’ve been enjoying the summer so much that we really didn’t plan anything crazy.  We opened our wine box from the wedding ceremony and read our letters we wrote each other the days before the wedding.  There was drinking, crying, laughing, and some dancing.

We had a little sushi picnic in the park where we held the ceremony. 

And, we opened our gifts to each other.  We went small, but I also knew that I wanted to make a photo album of our wedding photos as a gift to each other.  I know that as each year passes, people will be less likely to care about our wedding, (let’s be honest, no one will really ever care as much as we do!), but I still wanted some sort of album to have to physically look through whenever we want.  I made larger albums for our parents, grandparents and my sister/maid of honor, but I had put off making ours for one reason or another. 

That is until I came across Artifact Uprising.  Their books were exactly the feel I wanted and at less than 6” square they were the perfect size for keeping out in the living room.

I had picked up the Nate Berkus Metal Wing Bowl from Target a couple weeks ago and it was the perfect spot for our little books.

I made two, the first for the ceremony and formal photos, and the second with all the reception details and party pics!

The books are really high quality and the photos are matte, which I like.  Another feature I liked was pictures can go edge to edge.

While they’re a little pricey at $17 a book, I think they were worth it for our 1st anniversary.  And, the fact that they fit in with the paper theme, as well as take care of something that’s been on my to-do list for over a year is a bonus!

Now, I’m going to go back to looking at photos of Mexico and turn the heat up really high and pretend we’re back there!