All of the Love: Our Wedding Video

Today is one of my favorite days of the year. A whole day devoted to telling people how you feel about them? That's obviously my thing.

As I've said a thousand times both here and in real life, our wedding day was my favorite day ever because all there was was love. Everywhere, everyone, all day long. Our videographer very nicely reformatted our wedding video so I could upload to Vimeo and today, you get to see all of that love yourself. So without further ado, here is my favorite video in the world, by the wonderful Jonny Capuano. I would save this thing from a burning fire in a heartbeat.


Our Wedding Video! from Jackie Quigley on Vimeo.

the first again

As I said last year, this is one of my favorite months of the year.

There's so much love floating around, sometimes I just feel like my heart is going to explode. I hope this February, you all have someone who makes you feel like the luckiest girl alive, whether it's a romantic kind of love or not.

In that train of thought, my Etsy giveaway ended last night and...

 Congratulations Cassie! Expect an e-mail in your inbox later this afternoon. I can't wait to see what you choose.
And for those of you who'd still love to get something, use the code: monthoflove to get free shipping for the whole month of February. That's saving $3 on my heart banner that you all loved, or 50 cents on any card, which I think is a deal.

I think that's everything for now! I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and I'll see you all sometime next week.

my Valentine's Day line

Good morning friends!

I hope everyone had a wonderful, productive weekend. Ben and I sure did. Life is crazy lately, but we're both managing just fine. One important thing I accomplished this weekend was getting my Etsy shop ready for my upcoming favorite holiday: Valentine's Day!

There are eleven new cards in sweet & wild stationery, as well as a few of those heart banners that I posted about last week. Go visit my shop to see all of them and let me know what you think!

For those of you who want something for yourself, but don't quite have the money right now, OR if you just love free stuff [who doesn't?], I decided to do a little giveaway! You can enter to win $10 credit to sweet & wild stationery, which is the equivalent to 5 cards or a heart banner of your very own.

Just enter to win in this Rafflecopter widget below and a random winner will be picked on Friday. The winner will have her prizes by Valentine's Day, I promise.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

oh love

Blogger is being weird, so for some reason, it pushed this old post to the top of my page. I published this post two summers ago, when Ben was deployed and I was getting ready to go to France for two months. We weren't married yet, or even engaged, but I was dreaming of our wedding day, and it's funny, but nearly everything went exactly how I'd hoped it would go. It's funny how life works out, isn't it?

today is a beautiful day.

the sun is shining, it's currently 77 degrees in Rochester, NY, and i feel cute.

also, b called this morning!!!!

i was in the middle of brushing my teeth, foamy mouth and all, and i hear a random ringtone coming from my purse.

it's him, calling all the way from eastfreak nowhere.

we got to talk the whole time i was driving to work :)

on speaker of course

also, we have a skype date tonight.

so i am doing just fine.

butttt

i've had bad dreams about getting married lately.

so to get rid of those, i'm planting images of

 beautiful, happy weddings in my head.

and i've decided that in my dream wedding, here's how it'd go down:

this sweet little lace dress from here

60's hippie hair a la here and a pretty flower crown from here

a gorgeous colorful bouquet, like this one from here

and we would read this, by Pablo Neruda:

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way

because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you,

so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,

so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”

then we'd say i do, kiss, and live madly in love ever after.

-wildchild

all of my days

Last night, after such a lovely day of getting projects done around our little apartment and getting to some homework I'd been putting off, I decided I needed to take a creative break. 

I'd seen this project by Elise, and then a similar one on A Beautiful Mess a few days ago, and I thought it would be perfect to put up some pretty words on our walls. So, my mom brought me some supplies from home when she came over for lunch, and I had gotten paint at Michael's the night before [yay Christmas gift cards!]. I put on the Spotify playlist of songs that reminded me of our love story, and got down to business.

If you wanna do this yourself, you just need a canvas, black acrylic paint, a brush, and song lyrics that you love. I chose the last verse of "All of My Days" by Alexi Murdoch, the song to which I walked down the aisle.

I wrote down the lyrics ahead of time, but then Ben starting asking all these questions about spacing and the lines and stuff and then he watched me, which totally threw me off. SO I messed up the first line. I just went with it, added an elipses, and then got down to the real verse I wanted to do. It works.

I didn't worry about perfect looking words the first time around; I just wrote to get the words down. Then I went back over it all to make every letter equally as dark and to balance out some of the letters that didn't look right. I took a break part way through to eat dinner and washed my brush, which ended up messing it up a little, so I'd advise against that.

This is how it ended up. I wish the top two lines weren't so much bigger than the rest, but oh well. It's not perfect, nor is anything else in my life, and I like it that way. I'm hanging it up tonight and I think it's the perfect way to celebrate the fact that we've been married for six months on Sunday. What a wonderful six months they've been.

three & three

top from here. bottom by BA

We've been married for three months and three days now. It's an incredibly random number to get worked up about, but it just kind of hit me this weekend: three months seems like a long time and not such a long time all at once.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that this marriage thing is working out. It's better than anything I ever dreamed of, and believe me, I've been dreaming about this for a while. 

I'm a thankful girl on this three month & three day mensiversary, and that Avett Brothers lyric up there? That just explains it all.

my birthday boy

by BA

to the boy who unexpectedly stole my heart on May 14, 2009,

    the boy with the dance moves that inspire crowds everywhere,
    
    the boy that takes my sass and fixes it all with a big hug and a few forehead kisses,

    the boy who I can count on to build anything I need and fix anything I break,

    the boy that's the life of any party he goes to,

    the boy who gets excited about the dumbest things and wins my heart with his happy eye crinkles,

    the boy who looks just as good in cowboy boots and a black t-shirt as he does in a well tailored suit,

    the boy who willingly and without a complaint takes the public bus to school so that I can have the truck to go to work,

    the boy that vowed to always wash the dishes and has followed through on that so far,

    the boy who I share my heart, and now my life with,

HAPPY STINKIN BIRTHDAY!!!!!

I love all 22 years of you and I hope that you know that today and every day for the rest of your life.

the words

I had planned to share pictures from around our apartment on here today, but that's just not going to work. I love our place and am super proud of it, but it just doesn't translate well into pictures. it's like that awkward girl in high school that's pretty in real life, but has a talent for making the weirdest faces right when the camera shutter opens [me].

so today is for sharing the paintings of our vows, done by sweet Alana. we got frames for them yesterday and hung them up last night, but there are no pictures yet. I've been too busy just laying on the couch looking at them.

Ben and I wrote our vows together a few nights before the wedding. we grabbed a blanket, headed to a park, and sat on the grass talking about what we wanted to promise each other and how we should say it. we each wrote our own, but kept reading the drafts to each other, and at the end of the night, we knew we were finished when we read them to each other and cried.

that night is one of my favorite wedding memories. and then a few days later when I walked down that aisle and we read them to each other for real, with all of the weight and the promises behind them, with all of our loved ones there to hear them too, well that one is a memory that I will hold in my heart forever.

early morning

from here

i usually wake up early during the week to eat breakfast before i run.
i lay in bed, waking up, playing with my phone a little bit, and then come downstairs to the main floor, where i grab a banana or some cereal and sit in the little sunspots on my floor.
i'm usually a little dirty, from whatever fun i had in the sun the day before, but the birds don't care. they sit up on the tree branches and chirp anyways. they're my early morning soundtrack.

this is my time to wake up and decide what kind of day i'm going to have. a productive day or a fun day? the good ones are both. my days are usually both.

today is my bridal shower. i'm only having one, so [nearly] all of the women in my life that i love and look up to and enjoy spending time with will be here in one spot. we're celebrating the fact that i'm getting married in just over a month and i'm going to become Ben's wife. holy cow, i'm going to be a wife. 

so we're going to play Bridal Shower Bingo and the clothespin game and all of those fun games, eat wonderful food made by my sweet family and bridesmaids, they're going to bring gifts that will help Ben and i start our lives together, and we'll girl talk our afternoon away. 

i think today will be a day that's both. i get to spend the whole afternoon being blessed and showered with love by all of these women, and prepare for my new life while i'm at it. i'm so blessed to have a family and a bunch of bridesmaids that are willing to plan a big thing like this for me and i'm so blessed that even more people than that are planning on coming to enjoy the day with me.

this wedding thing is showing me how loved i really am, in more ways than one.