Rye Designs

sneak peek: meet jackson

Wed, 09 May 2012 21:45:00 -0600

Little Jackson was such a joy to photograph. We got to watch him play and discover the world around him, and he was such a happy baby. I wanted to quickly share a few sweet images of five-month-old Jackson, and I hope you enjoy them.

sonya & eddie's custom wedding invitations

Mon, 07 May 2012 21:54:00 -0600

To celebrate Sonya and Eddie's anniversary today, I thought it would be fun to post a project so dear to my heart that I couldn't let it go unshared. Dan and I started working on this wedding suite in 2009 with Sonya and Eddie's Save the Date cards. From there, we all worked closely to create a number of coordinated pieces to tie their wedding together. Even now, over two years later, it's still one of my favorite projects. I had so much fun working with them and seeing each piece come to life. Sonya and Eddie were married two years ago today and Dan and I were lucky enough to attend their amazing wedding in New York. Seeing everything before and throughout the wedding made it even more special.

Project included:

– Hand-drawn cherry blossoms and branches

– Save the Date cards and magnets

– Pocketfold invitations with monogram tag closure

– Invitation inserts with directions, a custom map, wedding information and RSVP postcard

– Rehearsal invitation postcards

– Folded wedding programs with monogram cover tag and custom map carried over from the main invitation

– Escort card luggage tags placed at the reception entrance—double duty as an escort card and wedding favor

– Table name cards using pictures to highlight all the places Sonya and Eddie have lived (separately and together)

– Coordinating dinner menus

– Thank you cards with Vietnamese translation for the groom's family

We wish Sonya and Eddie a very happy anniversary, and many more wonderful years together!

sneak peek: mike + erin = chelsea

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 15:57:00 -0600

Chelsea made her grand entrance a couple weeks earlier than expected—right as we were going out of town—and we finally got to meet her last weekend. What a precious, little thing she is. Here are a few of our favorite images from her session.

project life 2012: week three

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:05:00 -0600

Here we are at week three—still working on new habits, like meal planning, and still getting back into the groove of life after the holidays. This week I was able to include some fun things around work and home. Early in the week I made our own whole wheat bread with sundried tomatoes and parmesan cheese. It was surprisingly easy and really good. At work, my show season is in full swing, and things are BUSY! An image and a quote were chosen for a feature story in an industry magazine, so that was exciting. Not so exciting? The weather. It was dreary and disgusting.

I guess this page is out of order because the wall wasn't torn down in the bottom pictures, but during the week we watched a couple movies on the big screen—Forks Over Knives (documentary) and Toy Story in 3D (hence the 3D glasses). I still can't believe that I can watch 3D movies in my own basement, let alone movies that are projected at 120 inches wide. In the top right picture, we started building a LEGO Eiffel Tower.

Dan worked on the basement and knocked out more of the wall. On Saturday morning, we went to the hardware store to buy all the lumber and supplies for the wall structure. The basement looks so different every time I see it. It's really cool to see the transformation and the work that Dan is putting into it.

Not much to explain this week, and still loving this project.

project life 2012: week two

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:00:00 -0600

Week two, still loving this project, and feeling a lot less pressure. Getting things figured out during week one was the hard part, so now it's smooth sailing. Week two was when I discovered clean eating. Actually, I should say that week one was when I discovered it and bought a related magazine, but week two was where I actually took action and pictures. I used the magazine to plan our meals for the week, and during my grocery trip I bought a lot of ingredients to replace the "dirty" ones in our house. I included a couple pictures of the pantry organiztion. Last year, Dan and I made a huge change to our diets and started buying better foods so our pantry wasn't horrible when it came to certain things, but others changed a lot—like replacing sugar with agave, raw honey, and evaporated cane juice. I also made a batch of clean-eating almond flour chocolate chip cookies with my new mixer, and they were delicious!

So far it's been a mild winter, but we finally saw some winter temperatures, ice, and a tiny bit of snow. I took a screenshot of the weather forecast with my iPhone, and printed it to fit. When Dan and I weren't trying out new recipes, we were keeping warm and snuggling with the cats. In the upper right corner, I included a screenshot from a funny video I took of Merry and a train car. The orange "LAUGH, LOVE..." card came from my clementine kit.

I'm sure it doesn't seem that interesting now, but I decided to include a song verse from a current favorite—Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise by The Avett Brothers. I know it will be fun to look back and see what songs I liked during the year.

Overall, I just documented a bunch of mundane life during week two, but that's what this project is for me. I enjoy including the boring bits of the week because I know they'll be cool someday—whether that someday is months from now or years from now.

If you're curious what Project Life is, it's a scrapbooking system created by Becky Higgins. You can learn more here.

project life 2012: week one

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:20:00 -0600

Here we go—week one. I felt a lot of pressure this week to start everything a certain way and keep it consistent throughout the year. The top left pocket, for example, could either have a title card from the clementine paper kit or a printed card with a typed week-in-review. After I reminded myself that this project can be whatever I want from week to week, and that I bought the clementine kit to make this thing easy, almost all of my decisions were made for me. So, I'm using the clementine title cards with a stamped date range on each week, and that's the extent of my rules.

The first week of the year was pretty laid back for us. Even though I took a picture each day during the week, there were some that I didn't care to include and some that had the wrong orientation for the remaining pockets. So, I included what I wanted and even included the Lego London Tower Bridge twice because I liked two different images of it.

On New Year's, Dan and I worked on Legos and made our traditional cabbage soup. Also, Merry loves to lay on my office chair lately, so I wanted to capture that. To show the work Dan had done on a basement project up until this point, I included a 6x12 page protector as an insert with progress shots of the corner Dan demoed. The description (MISSION card) includes Dan's basement task list that I pulled from Google Docs. I printed the images separately, lined them up in the page protector, and then used my sewing machine to sew in the gaps so the photos would stay in place. Here you can see the front of the insert.

Here, you can see the back of the insert. (Yes, that's our sump pump in the corner and it really was enclosed by a structure that the previous owner built.) Otherwise, the first week's spread included a couple work-related pictures of things I see on a daily basis (my desk, notebook, and a plane landing over the highway), and a picture that I took of a friend and I at our first ballet class. At the bottom is a photo of our kitties eating their usual Saturday morning wet food, which is a weekly treat for them, and a punch bowl picture from a friend's baby shower. I cut down a half-sized index card and rounded two of the corners to have a photo description.

Overall, the first week went well and I love how easily everything came together—just print and slide into the pockets, adding some journaling here and there. Voilà!

If you're curious what Project Life is, it's a scrapbooking system created by Becky Higgins. You can learn more here.

sneak peek: mike + erin = baby girl

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:45:00 -0700

Just a quick show and tell—the first weekend in March found us exploring a couple different locations with our friends, Mike and Erin. Their little girl is due at the beginning of April, and Erin is looking fabulous. Here's a little sneak peek for them to enjoy this weekend.

project life 2012: introduction

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 22:54:00 -0700

I was convinced that 2012 was going to be just another year in the memory-keeping department. I always have the greatest intentions to take more pictures, remember our everyday lives, and document more. Then, when the holidays are over, I go back to work and those good intentions disappear. The days turn into weeks. The weeks turn into months. Before I know it, half the year has gone by and I have nothing to show for it. At the end of the year I'm left thinking we have no pictures of ourselves, and not much from the things we did this year either. What did we do this year?

Enter Project Life—a way of scrapbooking that I read about at the very end of 2011. It called out to my passions of memory keeping, picture making, and story telling. Unfortunately, since I was late to the game most of the products I wanted were unavailable. I had to wait over six weeks for the products to become available again. During that time I questioned whether I really wanted to go through with this project, but I had already invested some time and money preparing for it. After I returned from a work trip late-February, the products were at home waiting for me and I was more excited than ever. I am going to do this. I am going to document our 2012 and it is going to be a fantastic year.

I've spent the last two weeks catching up on the last nine, and now it's week 10. I'm fascinated by this format and the process. Unlike traditional scrapbooking, I totally enjoy the process and look forward to sorting through the week's photos and seeing which ones make the cut. Some weeks I'll only have a handful of photos and other weeks I'll have dozens. [By the way, I've also decided to take at least one photo a day this year, which has helped tremendously.] I like that I can do as little or as much work as I want each week, and I don't have to wait for the year to be over to fully appreciate the project. I already enjoy looking back through the weeks I've done.

Now that I'm caught up, I'll be posting weeks 1-9 first to keep things in order. Here is the title page I created. I took inspiration from Cathy Zielske's title pages, and the 6x12 insert design came from her here. I replaced the patterned paper with one from the Clementine digital paper pack.

The "living life one day at a time" card is from the clementine paper kit (see link below). I created the silhouettes last year with the intention of hanging them somewhere in the house. I'm glad I was able to use them for this project. I also created the map of Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky last year by digitally hand-tracing a Google map (seriously). I placed a star where we currently live. I may add monograms to the silhouettes later, but for now I'm happy with the title pages.

Have I mentioned how excited I am about this project?

If you're curious what Project Life is, it's a scrapbooking system created by Becky Higgins. You can learn more here. I have the Clementine kit, Design A page protectors, and 6x12 page protectors. I also have the black classic album from We R Memory Keepers. I'm printing everything at home on my Epson R2880 wide-format printer.

twelve days of christmas

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:10:00 -0700

Every year around October, while we're in the thick of creating holiday cards for others, I realize that I'll need to order our own cards soon... and that I have no design ideas whatsoever. Then, I wonder why it's fairly easy to make things for others, but so incredibly hard to make things for myself. The process repeats until mid-November when I know that I'm almost out of time and I'm still searching for that perfect idea.

This year, we had a few different ideas and one kept taking the lead. It took some extra steps to plan and implement, but once we ironed out the details and knew we could do it, we just had to. I was so excited to assemble the cards with Dan and get them ready to mail. Also, since I've wanted to make an advent calendar for a while, this card was a great compromise and a fabulous way to share the daily activiites with others. Check out the makings of our card with our version of the 12 Days of Christmas.

Our first day of Christmas was yesterday, December 13th, and the activities will go through Christmas Eve. If you didn't get a card and would like to play along, here are the activities:

12/13: Make paper snowflakes and decorate with them.
12/14: Make breakfast for dinner and eat in your pajamas.
12/15: Take food to a local food pantry.
12/16: Have a holiday movie night.
12/17: While shopping, buy something extra and donate it to charity.
12/18: Buy a new ornament to place on the tree.
12/19: Write 10 things you are thankful for this year. Tape it to your mirror.
12/20: Make a special treat and deliver it to a neighbor.
12/21: Drink hot chocolate.
12/22: Take a drive to look at Christmas lights.
12/23: Have a game night.
12/24: Fill a small stocking. Drop it off on someone's door as a surprise.

Tailor these activities to your own home. If you don't want to buy something on the list, then do something handmade. If you don't like hot chocolate, then have hot cider. Live in a cozy, little neighborhood? Instead of driving, bundle up and walk around to look at Christmas lights. Everyone's results are going to look different, and that's what I love most. To start us out, here are the paper snowflakes Dan and I made last night. We haven't decorated with them yet, but we will. Let's see your snowflakes.

sneak peek: [r] family session

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:27:00 -0700

I can't believe it's November already, but I have to say that October went out with a bang! Not only did we get to meet a cute family with two little girls, but the weather was wonderful and the maple trees along their street were at their peak. The images below only give you a glimpse of the amazing colors. Check out the sneak peek and say hello to the [R] family...

sneak peek: hayden's newborn session

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 15:00:00 -0600

Our friends Sara and Bobby are such special and inspiring people in our lives. If the couple hours we spent meeting Hayden last weekend was any indication, I know these two will be wonderful parents as well. While I finish editing their images and coming up with the words for their full post, enjoy a little sneak peek of their happy baby boy.

sneak peek: jesse's senior session

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:57:00 -0600

Now that Dan and I are back in the office from a couple big trips this fall, I'm digging my way out of images and orders. Here is a quick sneak peek of Jesse's senior session. His session was special for a couple reasons—first because he is one of Dan's brothers, and second because the session took place at the Rye family farm. It's a photographer's paradise with the family's abandoned cabin, old tractors, and overgrown fields. I'll have more later!

sneak peek: ava is two

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:13:00 -0600

Between Lila and Ava, last weekend was filled with cute little girls. I can hardly hold back the rest of the [A] family's session, but you'll have to check back next week after their premiere. I think the following images will give you a good idea of the adventure we had.

sneak peek: lila is one

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:52:00 -0600

Could this family be any cuter? Seriously. I can't believe how much Lila's grown and learned since we saw her in April.

Here are a few images for Maggie and Ryan to see until their premiere. I can't wait to show the rest!

sneak peek: [h+s] family session

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:58:00 -0600

At the end of August, we had the pleasure of hamming it up with a group of teens. This is not just any group of teens as the first two boys you see are my twin nephews (how old do I feel right now?!). I'll give more background to the session in the full post, but for now I know the moms are waiting for a sneak peek!

kellie and dave's anniversary

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 21:00:00 -0600

From the moment you meet Kellie and Dave, you can tell that they were made for each other. They are such sweet and supportive souls, but love a little fun and competition, too (you should see Kellie play Stratego!).

For their session, we were celebrating their second wedding anniversary and wanted to make sure the session represented them as a couple. We headed to a park where they could hang out on a blanket, enjoy the scenery, and play a little frisbee together. Dan and I joined in for a bit before ending the session and heading to the nearest ice cream shop. Let me just tell you that tossing a frisbee is not a skill of mine, but eating ice cream certainly is. You just can't beat an evening with good light, good people, and good eats.

Enjoy our favorites from Kellie and Dave's session.

josh is two

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:48:00 -0600

Josh's sessions are always a blast (and a good workout for us). He runs around and does what he loves to do—whether that means going down the slide over and over or stomping around while making dinosaur sounds. Working with this family is always a joy, and their session premieres always bring good tears.

For this session, we were celebrating Josh's second birthday and how much he's grown over the last year. We had custom cupcakes made for the session, and took some time out from the playground to enjoy the sugar. I got vanilla to be safe, but I should have known that Josh is a boy after my own heart—chocolate all the way! Normally I like the colorful images from a park, but the cupcake series in black & white was just so sweet. As the sun went down, we ended the session by catching lightning bugs and playing in the last bit of sunlight.

#2 completed

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:52:00 -0600

#2: Sew myself an apron

One of the goals on my 101 in 1001 list was to sew myself an apron, and I'm proud to say that I can cross this goal off the list (as of February, actually). Not only was this my first "big" sewing project—big compared to the few simple pillows or curtains I've made over the years—but as far as I can remember this is my very first apron. I used a thicker home decor fabric because I didn't want the apron to be thin and frumpy, but I'm not sure that was the best idea. I think the apron turned out a little too stiff, so I just need to wash it a dozen times or wear it in somehow. I love the cheerful fabrics, though, and I'm amazed that I made all of those ruffles.

After the apron, I decided to make a yoga bag to hold my mat, which turned out super cute, and then I took a big leap... I decided to make a purse. I got through 3/4 of the directions, to the point where I had to put the inside and the outside of the purse together, and I failed miserably. Again, I used a home decor fabric for a sturdier purse, and the purse became too thick to work with toward the end. A different style of purse may have worked better with the thicker fabric, and after I stuck a finger with a pin for the 100th time I threw in the towel. Sadly, I haven't touched my sewing machine since then, but I have been spending my time on other creative things. There are still more sewing projects I want to do for the house, so hopefully I'll get back to my machine soon.

What projects have you done recently? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

sneak peek: kellie and dave's anniversary

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 01:15:00 -0600

Our second session of the July 4th weekend was with our friends Kellie and Dave. They wanted some images to celebrate their second wedding anniversary, and we were so happy to join the celebration. They are such a cute couple and the sweetest people—just see how Dave looks at Kellie and you'll understand. Check out a couple images from our session, and I'll have more for you next week.

sneak peek: josh is two

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:51:00 -0600

Over the holiday weekend, we spent some time with our good friends Scott, Mary Ellen, and Josh. We don't see them nearly enough, so it was surprising to see how much Josh had grown. He's a big two-year-old now, doing things on his own—like going down slides!—with a mind of his own, too. We met up at a local park and let Josh run wild. We did intervene for a surprise birthday treat, though, from a little cakery in downtown Burlington.

I'll have more to post later, but here are his newborn and one-year highlights if you just can't wait for more Josh.