Hello friends!

I have a nice long “scrapbook post” for you today, filled with cute pets, pretty flowers, wedding planning updates, and an assortment of tasty and/or strange food. Enjoy scrolling through this gallery of my recent photos!

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p o r t r a i t s

First off… Sully and I got our engagement photoshoot pictures back, ah! They were so fun to look through. This is one of my favorites. ❤ If you want to see more, check out the “Photos” page of our wedding website here. You can also find our photographers on social media @fredericksphotosandfilms or on their website.

We went to a Valentine’s Ball in February, for which Jeff wore this extremely pink shirt with a drumset tie and his ever-faithful sunglasses. This photo makes me smile.

It was too hard to resist the pretty sun squares on the side of the wall that morning. I had to take a selfie with them. 😛

Chessie and Logan accidentally coordinated one day at church and asked me to take some pictures to record it. I did a proper photoshoot with them another day, which you can see here.

My matron-of-honor, Aria, came down earlier in February to do thrift shopping and wedding planning, and is here now for my bridal shower this weekend. Last time she came we stopped at Greenberry’s to get some tea, matcha, and a sandwich before she had to board her plane home.

More selfies which I like because PORTRAIT MODE. Man, it’s so fun to have a DSLR-like option on your phone!

Here’s a very gray photo for a “no filter, no makeup” challenge by someone I follow on Instagram. My hair was in braids because we had a family workday that day to prepare for the wedding – things like cleaning out the garage bathroom, mowing the ceremony area, fixing a fence, and painting some patches of new siding on the house.

p e t s

I took a few pictures of our cow, fondly called Meat, before she became her namesake. Poor Meat.

Never pass up a good black-and-white cow picture. Huh, that sounds like I’m referring to a Holstein. I meant black and white like the filter. If you were confused. 😛

Nellie had to share her pasture for a while. She wasn’t sure about it at first, but enjoyed the company after a while.

Nellie is always looking for things-which-are-not-food to eat anyway.

Never pass up a good black-and-white goat picture either I guess?

Does anyone else think goats’ eyes are creepy? Because I think goats’ eyes are creepy.

A series of lovely glowy photos featuring Nellie not cooperating as a model. Ah well, the light makes her photogenic despite the grass sticking out of her mouth.

We’ll end Nellie’s part of this post with a phone picture of her grazing by the graveyard. Carmen attempted to bring her inside while we were working on the aforementioned garage bathroom, but… let’s just say she was quickly shooed out again. Goats are not the most tactful of animals.

Switching gears to the FLUFFIEST PUPPY EVER, AHHH. I got to hold this little guy on a hay delivery and he felt like a teddy bear! ❤ I want to squeeze him again.

The customer also had two sweet adult Australian Shepherds with those striking multi-colored eyes.

And this energetic little mutt with silky ears. It was a rewarding hay delivery. 🙂

n a t u r e

We’ll kick off this section with a lovely parking lot sunset. Sometimes I honestly prefer taking sunset pictures with my phone camera rather than my DSLR. It seems to capture the colors and theda spread of the sky better, you know?

A couple of months ago a big flock of Canadian geese invaded our pond and called it home for days or weeks on end. This wasn’t even all of them!

It’s maybe a bit of a stretch, but I think the middle of this log in our woodpile looks like a heart. I sent Sully this picture with the message “This might be a stretch but… I love you!” And he replied, “What a log-ical conclusion. I woodn’t have it any other way. I love you too~” I told him that was an awful pun and he responded, “Oakay. I see my puns are a little un-poplar.” *facepalm*

The rest of the nature section is completely filled up with flowers because OH MY, I’ve been taking so many flower pictures! It’s hard to resist snapping a picture with my phone when I walk past these beauties scattered around the house.

This anemone flower is so perfect and vivid it looks almost fake, doesn’t it?

Last year I would have said I’m not a fan of tulips – they’re too gaudy for my taste. But this year Mom made the loveliest bouquets with them that I may have changed my mind.

I mean… how can you look at this bouquet and still say you don’t care for tulips?

s t a t i o n e r y

Wedding planning is humming right along – we’re getting down to the wire with less than 45 days to go, ah! Last month the biggest wedding-related thing I did was making and sending out the invitations.

I loved painting, designing, lettering, sealing, and stamping these, but it was quite a long process, my goodness. I absolutely love the result though! Look how pretty!

These gold seals added a beautiful touch. I got this hot glue gun and also these gold wax sticks to go in it, which made sealing the envelopes so much faster and smoother than heating up individual pieces of wax over a flame like I used to do.

I really like how the invitation paired with the navy blue envelopes. Writing the addresses with white gel pen over the dark blue was so satisfying. 😀

I painted anemones on the invitation because we’re hoping to use some in the wedding florals! Aren’t these purple anemones gorgeous?

e t c e t e r a

We’ve now reached the last category in the post! I got this boba tea at a cute little shop in town with my sister Megan and cousin Jianna. I started out really liking it but by the end it kinda made my stomach hurt. Have you had boba before? Do you like it?

This is how our house looked in winter, but the scenery has changed since I took this picture. The trees are getting green and the redbud tree in front is… well it’s actually not pink because the buds froze. Sadness! But it’s getting little green leaves on it too.

Here’s a random snapshot taken long ago when Maggie and I went down to the creek. (Maggie’s our yellow labrador, if you’re new here.) I liked the texture of this wood post and old numbers.

(These pictures aren’t related to each other but I still put them in a collage, heh.) Left: I was scrubbing the shower and found out that Portrait mode can even make bathroom cleaners look photogenic! Right: The last Dutch licorice star my friend Aria gave me for Christmas/New Year’s. I still have her other licorice from licorice.com though and it’s quite tasty!

I realized while painting one day that I hadn’t thoroughly cleaned my paint water mug in… probably years. I usually just rinse it out. So I went to work with a Magic Eraser sponge and a wash cloth and got it mostly clean again! Now the little fox can see properly. 🙂

HAHA this one cracks me up. I found this cake at Food Lion with an artistic sprinkle of exactly four mini chocolate chips. Does anyone else find this mysterious? Is it supposed to look… pretty? It just makes me confused.

Both of these photos are from our annual family trip to Costco. My parents generously divide their cashback rewards each year among all seven people in our family, so we all get to go and pick out whatever we want. 🙂 It’s so fun. My brothers were with us too, but they were off somewhere else in the store I guess. One of the things Megan bought was a bouquet of tulips and it was SO PRETTY!

This wouldn’t be an Etcetera post without some indoor photography, right? The Great Room looks lovely at golden hour. Ooh and look, a silhouette selfie!

I’m going to end this post with a very exciting announcement – my sister Megan is starting a magazine! It’s called Cut + Paste, and it’s a magazine full of beautiful photos and artwork you can cut out and frame, use for art journaling, display on your coffee table, etc. Go check out her Kickstarter here to learn more about it and consider pre-ordering the first copy! (All the pictures in these frames are from the sample issue. How beautiful are they?!)

Wow, that was even longer than Etcetera posts normally are. Ah well, I had a lot to catch you guys up on! I hope you enjoyed that collection of photos. 🙂 Before you go, I’d love to chat with you in the comments.

What have you been up to lately? Which of these categories did you enjoy the most?

Thanks so much for reading, my friends, and have a lovely day!

***Allison***