31 Days:: Seven Ways to Document Your Love Story
Matthew and I are celebrating our seven year anniversary today so it seemed appropriate to provide seven ways you can document your love story.
1. Make a scrapbook: I started scrapbooking when Matthew and I started dating. We have a 12×12 scrapbook of our dating story, another one of our engagement and then one of our marriage. It is so fun to go back and look at.
2. Make a video: You could make a video – either of the two of you sharing your story, or a montage of special moments.
3. Create a collage: I love seeing groups of photos together from a period of time. Go and buy a collage frame at Michaels, or make one of these amazing collages from Collage.com.
4. Make a photo book: Of course, you could make a Shutterfly photo book celebrating your love.
5. Write your story down: Matthew blogged our love story yesterday. It is so special to have it recorded in his words. Alternately, you could fill out a love story “prompt” book, like the Book of Us: A Journal of Your Love Story in 150 Questions.
6. Create map art: I have seen many crafty pieces on Pinterest that use maps in interesting ways to show where a couple is from – like this one and this one. SO cute. This is on my list to make for Matthew and me.
7. Annual anniversary book: Similar to the birthday book I talked about this week, the Our Wedding Anniversary Memory Book
I hope this inspires you to document your love story. Love is definitely a legacy that should be recorded for generations to come.
This is the 23nd day in a series: 31 Days of Memory Keeping. Check out all the posts here.
My husband made a photo collage of our dating years as a Valentine’s gift for me the February before he proposed to me. It is hanging above our bed and I just love looking at it and remembering that sweet time when we first fell in love. I also blogged about our love story, along with several other beautiful love stories I wanted to record for my kids to read someday: http://tjsmhanesfamily.blogspot.com/search/label/Real%20Life%20Love%20Stories. And, each year, on our anniversary, I write a special post just for him. I also started a notebook that I can write love notes to him and he can write to me. My grandma still has all the notebooks she wrote to my grandpa and, when she shared them with me once, I just knew I had to do the same. They were married for 62 years and still very much in love the day my grandfather passed away. I still remember seeing my grandma as she said goodbye to her love…it still breaks my heart. But, it is beautiful to see the memories she still has of their love and to be able to carry on that legacy of love in our marriage. A sweet lady at our church bought us the anniversary book too for a wedding gift. I keep forgetting to write in it, but I did the first two years. I haven’t scrap booked our dating years, but I do have a scrapbook from our wedding and our first two years of marriage before our daughter was born. Now, I mostly record everything on my blog, but I want to start doing photo books too. 🙂
Congratulations! And Matthew’s post is so sweet. I feel like our stories track with each other in some ways, since we celebrated 7 years of marriage in August, and my daughter is only a few weeks younger than Elias:)
Oh, and I grew up in the Spring City;) I recognized that name/trolley right away:)
Happy Anniversary you two! These tips are wonderful. That photo is so awesome!
Happy Anniversary!! Matthew’s post is beautiful. Funny how even though I don’t know you (have been reading here for some time now) I could see the real you in that first conversation too. Just perfect.
Happy Anniversary Girl….love you Both xoxoxo
Last summer, for our tenth wedding anniversary I finally got around to using the scanned photos of our wedding and making a photobook. It’s such a wonderful keepsake and I’m so glad I took the time to make it. Beforehand, we never looked at those photos and now my five year old daughter looks at me as a “princess” at least weekly.
I started scrapbooking 6 months before we got engaged, but I still haven’t scrapbooked our proposal! Or how we met. We’ve been married over 10 years, known each other almost 15. I need to get these stories down.
Also, I wish I had the negatives for my wedding photos. I decided to scrapbook my wedding photos instead of have a traditional album, and now I kind of wish I had that too.
Our wedding photographer went out of business and sold us the high-resolution pictures and the rights to use them as we please. I’d love to create a photo book that is a little easier to handle and look at then the one that he made as a part of our package.
I also have two word documents where I have pasted all of the 100’s of emails that my husband and I sent back and forth as we started dating and got engaged. I’d love to turn these in to some sort of book (I’m thinking more like a blog book because of the quantity of text) with pictures from the same time, The pictures are harder for me to imagine because they are not digital and I am not sure how good the quality would be for a book…
I have been scrapbooking for some time now and yes, you’d have a great time reminiscing memories when viewing each page. I hate the idea of making a mess on my workspace to design a layout, plus I’ve got to spend extra dollars for the embellishments. However, all these hassles are erased when I know I’m happy with the activity and I enjoy the luxury of being able to preserve memories creatively.