Weddings

Clearly, I have hit that point in life when a lot of my friends are getting married.  We got to celebrate Ruth's wedding over the summer, and once school started, my sweet cousin got married.  This past weekend, one of my closest friends from high school got married, and in a little over a month, another one of our good friends from Jordan is getting married.  What joy!  So here are some pictures from the last two that I enjoyed so much:

we got to hang out on a beautiful private beach in NY

a little fuzzy, but you can still see that big smile!

making their vows

my sister was a bridesmaid! and she made that dress by herself! crafty runs in the family :)

me and my sweet cousin, Kayla

we have a completely normal relationship.

This past weekend was Macy's wedding. Macy's name isn't Macy, it's Ben, but when he introduced himself at YoungLife camp in 2007, he said "I'm amazing" and we heard "I'm Macy."  We've called him that ever since.  Macy and I became really good friends throughout that week, and we kept in touch after we left.  We would take turns making road trips to hang out with each other.  When I got married, Macy had arrived in the US that morning from a trip to Israel, got straight on another plane to Texas, and showed up at the church just in time.  He also came by to visit a few weeks ago at the tail end of a fundraising trip (he's going to be an area director for YoungLife in PA), which was fantastic.  This time, it was my turn to hit the road and see him marry a beautiful, fun woman in upstate Virginia.  It was an outdoor wedding - on his grandparents' property right on the Shenandoah River.  I was so caught up in the ceremony that I forgot to take pictures - it was that beautiful. I was so excited to celebrate his marriage with his friends and family.  I did manage to get a couple photos after the ceremony:

my ridiculously tall date / younger sister... (I was cheating with 3 inch wedges)

marriage: the great adventure!

the party tent!

his wedding...

my wedding... Sharptop Cove buddies since '07!

One Year

One year ago...

The Marriage of Arianne Winston & Jeff Lott from Anna Lisa Stone on Vimeo.


...I married my best friend and the love of my life.  It's been a crazy year, filled with travels, new adventures, and a whole lotta growth, but it's been a fantastic journey so far!  So to celebrate our first year of marriage, Jeff got me flowers!

Some wonderful family members treated us to dinner as an anniversary gift as well, so we got to eat at a fancy local restaurant.  The food was great!

beef, onion, and goat cheese sliders

foie gras and brioche

glazed bacon - which was fantastic with the foie gras and the brioche!

Jeff's NY strip steak

green beans with toasted almonds

my filet mignon

The restaurant was pretty dark, so the pictures aren't as clear as I'd like.  But the food was tasty, and my date was pretty awesome too :)

my handsome date :)

And for fun, we got all dressed up in our wedding clothes to recreate one of our favorite wedding pictures.  Here's the original (photo taken by Matt Thompson):

...and here's this year's photo:

Sadly, no adorable nephew in the background :(  But not too shabby for a self timer!

All in all, it was a lovely anniversary.  On to year two!

Decorating With Crafty Things, Pt 2

So last semester, I wanted to hang pictures on my wall with twine and mini-clothespins.  It looked like this:

And then I saw these really cute pictures on Pinterest of banners on tables at wedding receptions.  I thought it would be cool to mesh the ideas, and what I came up with was twine, mini-clothespins, and burlap squares with painted letters on them.  I ordered the burlap, but totally ordered the wrong color by accident.  I was surprised when I opened the box to find a light green colored burlap.  But I figured since we were doing outdoorsy type decorations, with trees and all, that green would work just fine.  I got some brown paint, and started painting letters.  Maya was here helping out, she cut all the squares.  As we finished the squares, we strung them up in the kitchen to dry.

And they ended up looking like this:

The other big project was making the signs.  There were 5 signs - "Gifts" (which you can see above) , "How sweet it is to be loved by you" (on the sweets table), "Mr" and "Mrs" (to go on either side of the bride and groom's table), and "Here comes the bride" (to be carried by our ring bearer).  I decided I didn't want Landon, Jeff's nephew, to carry a pillow down the aisle, and I had seen this cute idea of a "Here comes the bride" sign from Rachael and Geoff's wedding (of Geoff Duncan Photography).  So I went to Habitat for Humanity's Restore, and bought pieces of do-it-yourself hardwood flooring, painted them white, sanded off a bunch of paint for a distressed look, and painted words on them in teal paint.

painting on the kitchen floor 

the signs, pre-sanding 

Landon! 

how sweet it is.... to eat lots of candy :)

Decorating With Crafty Things, Pt. 1

One of my absolute favorite parts of planning the wedding: the decorations.  Also known as crafty play time....  I love making crafty things - whether it was painting tshirts, or stenciling animals on my bedroom walls, or moving overseas to learn a language so I could write the beautiful script, it was all lots of fun for me!  So after deciding that I'd make most of the decorations myself, things really got interesting.  I spent way too much time trolling on pinterest for ideas instead of listening to lectures, read a lot of wedding blogs and DIY blogs and craft blogs... I felt completely justified in it though, because in the long run, making my own decorations would save money and give me artistic control.  It also gave me a chance to involve some friends in the process.

So the first major decoration choice was the guest book.  I'm not really a fan of a traditional guest book, I don't feel like it's something I'd look at again.  But then I found this super cool idea of a tree trunk, and guests would use a stamp pad to put their thumbprints on the tree to make leaves and sign beneath that.  And that's exactly what I did.  I bought some heavy duty paper and a few different green ink pads, and then Maya and I painted the tree trunk.  I bought a picture frame, painted it white and sanded off the edges to give it an older, more distressed look.  I painted Jeff's and my name on the bottom, along with the date.  Viola!  Wall art/guestbook = done.

our guestbook

The next major decision was about the flowers.  After looking at fresh flower prices, I had decided not to go that way.  So I began to look for DIY flower options.  My sister actually sent me a link to this blog (www.greenweddingshoes.com), so I thought I'd check to see if there were paper flower options there.  That's where I found my flowers (you can see them pictured above).  The flowers are made out of coffee filters, wooden dowel rods, and brown tissue paper.  Several friends from church here (thank you Mary, Kristina, and Pam!) volunteered their time to help make them, and we had them all done the week before the wedding.  Unfortunately, a bunch of them  didn't take kindly to being transported cross-country in a box in the back of a car, so my sister and my cousin from Argentina were kind enough to help me fix and remake the broken ones in Texas.  The flowers were put into mason jars, which were filled with Spanish moss and wrapped with sage-colored burlap and cream ribbon.  They were used as centerpieces (placed on top of slices of tree trunks - thank you Aaron for cutting and sanding them!), and used to decorate the other main tables as well.

my cousin Fiona 

working on the flowers.  except Helena... she was doing homework.

The other major flower decisions were about the bouquets.  I knew that I wanted fresh flowers for mine, and that I wanted calla lilies and baby's breath.  But the bridesmaids bouquets were different.  I decided on silk flowers for the bridesmaids, partly because then there wouldn't be any allergy issues and partly because we could make them ahead of time.  So we got some cream colored flowers from Hobby Lobby, and each bouquet had a peony, a hydrangea, and a ranunculus.  Totally my new favorite flower ;]  We wrapped them in a sheer white ribbon, and then added a thinner teal ribbon as an accent.  I thought they looked pretty awesome!  Karen (more about her later) made them, and did an incredible job.

the bridesmaids - from left to right: Bethany, Anna Lisa, Helena, and Aisling

Planning the Wedding

Looking back at the last several months, there are a bunch of little stories that keep coming to mind.  And since many of my friends and family have no idea how this transitional planning period went down, I thought I'd share some of my favorites...  Starting with Barbara.

Barbara is an incredible woman. She has an incredible amount of joy and energy all the time, and I absolutely love being around her!  She was one of my fantastic YoungLife leaders in high school, and we've kept in touch over the years.  Well, Barbara got engaged to a pretty cool dude not long before I got engaged, so we spent quite a bit of time talking about planning and marriage counseling and relationships, and I was lucky enough to get to be at her wedding to celebrate that wonderful day :]  But one of the best things she could have told me was that this time didn't have to be stressful.  It could be completely enjoyable - a crazy adventure - I only had to choose to see it that way.  My kinda girl!  Often I'd be reminded of her words, especially when things weren't working out and I was getting stressed and overwhelmed by the thought of all that was left to be done.  It seems so small, but it made a world of difference for me.

Which brings me to the planning.  Most of the time, I really enjoyed planning our wedding.  I loved looking for creative ways to decorate, for ways to make all of my decorations, sifting through some of my favorite songs to pick out what music we'd use in the ceremony.  That was fun.  What wasn't fun though was searching for venue.  That was stressful.  Jeff's family was so kind in driving all over the place to take pictures and look at venues and report back to me.  One week got really bad.  I thought I had found the perfect place - it was secluded, this beautiful chapel with floor-to-ceiling windows all the way around, so you could see the woods surrounding the chapel... It was breath-taking.  But so was the price.  I just couldn't justify paying that much for the chapel, so I had moved on and was looking for a new place to hold the ceremony.  After nearly a week though, I hadn't found anything that looked the way I imagined, or that was within our budget.  I was frustrated and stressed and didn't know how to solve this problem, so I decided to take a break for a while.  One of the things I did on my breaks at that point was to look through the blog of this AMAZING wedding photographer - Geoff Duncan (www.geodun.com).  He does really beautiful work.  I loved looking through his posts and getting ideas for my own wedding.  That day, he posted pictures from this little historic square in McKinney - Chestnut Square.  It looked so charming and tucked away, exactly what I wanted in my venue.  I started looking into it more, called up the place to talk about prices, and got more and more excited as time passed.  It looked perfect, it was an intimate setting, within our budget, and available on the day we wanted!  So we went ahead and put down the deposit, and began to plan our wedding around this little historic square.  It may sound kind of silly, but I totally attribute finding this place to Geoff, and I'm really grateful for that post.

outside of the chapel

Chestnut Square was the perfect place for our wedding - we had a small group of people there, so we didn't need a lot of space.  There was a beautiful indoor/outdoor setting, so we could hang around outside, surrounding by budding plants and historic buildings... The chapel was simple and beautiful, and we got to use an entire historic house as the bridal suite.  It was a really fun experience for me!