Fashion, Travel & Lifestyle Blog || Est. 2012 || Virginia Beach, VA
I recently hosted the most darling Masters themed dinner party, and I'm so excited to recap it here on the blog! I am obsessed with anything to do with this iconic golf tournament, and I loved coordinating all of the little touches to bring this party theme to life. I'm sharing all of the details below!
A few months ago, we made an exciting upgrade to our master bedroom in our home. It was a low-effort upgrade that had pretty amazing results. (Isn't that the best type of home upgrade?) We got rid of the non-aesthetic shades that came with our master bedroom, and upgraded to chic wooden shades from SelectBlinds. I'm excited to share a full review with you today, and keep reading for an exclusive discount code for SelectBlinds below!
Merry Christmas Week! In years past, I always enjoyed sharing about my Christmas decor in my apartments each year on the blog. While I unintentionally skipped doing that the past two years, I wanted to bring it back for 2025 as a way to always remember this special first Christmas season in our first home! The majority of my decor is in our formal living room, with some small additional touches in our dining room and family room. I hope to continue to grow our Christmas decor collection each year in our house, but for this year I love what we started with!
This post is also the first time I've shared pictures of some furnished rooms in our house on my blog. Ryan and I have been very hard at work since we moved in early October! 😊 Looking forward to continuing the decorate these rooms and the rest of the house in the years to come. In the meantime, to keep up with our house updates in real-time, follow my new Instagram account @home.sweet.mead!
I'm excited to finally share our wedding registry items with you today! This was one part of wedding planning that I didn't want to write any blog posts about last year before the wedding. I wanted to give a good bit of time after getting married to get the chance to use most of our registry items and be able to share what I thought of them once we'd actually used them. (Spoiler alert: all but one registry item have been great! We only had to make one return.) Let's dive into what stores we registered at, and what items we registered for!
One special branding detail that I knew I wanted our wedding to have was a custom crest. I'm not sure when this tradition originated, or why it's gotten so popular with weddings as of late. But I knew I loved custom crests and definitely wanted one! 😊 Having a custom crest is such an easy way to elevate the design elements surrounding your wedding, and to give everything a cohesive and polished feel. I thought it would be fun to share a post on the design process for our crest, and also recap all the ways that I used it for the wedding day and beyond.
I truly can't say enough good things about our wedding reception venue, the Wyndham Virginia Beach Oceanfront Hotel. We went with the very classic "afternoon church wedding ceremony, evening hotel ballroom reception" combo for our wedding day. I think there is something so timeless and wonderful about a hotel ballroom wedding reception, and it really is easy from a planning perspective as well (since the linens, tableware and food and beverage is usually done all in-house).
Amazon Prime Day is in full swing for 2025! I was pleasantly surprised to see so many of my favorite fashion and home items that I already own and love being included in this year's sale. I know there are so many bloggers and influencers spamming you at all directions right now with Prime Day picks. Hope it's okay to just share a handful items that I personally own and use. 😊
All of these are currently at lower price points than I purchased them for! The fashion items are all things I've bought myself that I love to wear and think are good quality. The home decor items are a mix of things I've bought, as well as some of my favorite wedding registry items that I was gifted at bridal showers!
When I would dream about my future wedding day when I was in high school, college and my early 20s, the number one part of the wedding day that I'd fixate on and dream about specifically was the wedding reception dance floor. I love to dance, and the thought of being on a dance floor surrounded by the love of my life and all of the people in our lives that we love seemed like heaven on earth to me! I joked to friends in the months leading up to the wedding that the one aspect of wedding planning that I was a bridezilla about was anything to do with our wedding reception playlist! God bless the poor DJ that would have to put up with me. 😉
Anyways, before I get into recapping our full wedding reception on the blog, I wanted to share a detailed blog post with our wedding playlists, for cocktail hour, dinner and of course the dance floor! Below you can read about the must-plays, the do-not plays, and even the newest songs I would've added to the playlist that didn't exist yet in November 2024. And of course I have plenty of dance floor photos to share with you too!
Last month, Ryan and I got to cross off a bucket list item for both of us: attending a major golf championship! Majors are the four most prestigious annual competition events in the golf world. They include The Masters in April, The PGA Championship in May, The US Open in June and The Open in July. This year the PGA Championship was held at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, NC. Ryan and I got to attend on Saturday May 17th, and I'm excited to finally recap our day at the PGA here on the blog!
My favorite little southeastern town is Edenton, North Carolina. My aunt and uncle moved there a few years ago, and I first visited their new town in 2021. From my first visit on, I've thought of Downtown Edenton as a heaven on earth. It's idyllic and charming, and you really do feel like you're walking through a real life version of a TV town! If you've ever wanted to visit Blue Bell, Alabama from Hart of Dixie, Serenity, South Carolina from Sweet Magnolias, or Stars Hollow, Connecticut from Gilmore Girls... Edenton really captures all of those vibes.
I love Edenton so much that it was actually the location of my bachelorette party (and one of my bridal showers!). I first published this blog post in 2022, but Edenton has had some great new small businesses open in the last couple of years, so I thought it was due time for an update to my Travel Guide!
I've shared before on my blog and Instagram that Ryan and I first connected by matching on the dating app Hinge in February 2022. But I never took the time to share our full story with more details. I thought this would be fun to do for today's Wedding Wednesday post!
 |
| May 1st 2022 |
In January, I got to take Ryan to visit my favorite city for the first time! It was a very quick trip, and I feel like I never have enough time to see all of my friends or do everything I miss doing in Charlotte. But we did knock out several fun things, and Ryan got to meet four of my Charlotte girlfriends and some of their significant others!! So, I'll still count the weekend as a win for our first Charlotte experience together!
Here's a little recap of what we did during the weekend:
I read 42 books in 2023, and it's time to recap my absolute favorite reads. For several years now, I have done a recap post sharing only the very best books of the year. I give out five-star book ratings on Goodreads pretty sparingly, so you know that if one of these books is featured in today's post that I truly loved it. I had four novels, and three non-fiction books make the cut this year! One book was a re-read from a few years ago, the rest were all new to me.
My favorite way to start off a new year is with news about the winter edition of the Lilly Pulitzer Sunshine Sale! I am more excited than normal for this Lilly sale. Why? Because I will be on the hunt for all things wedding! White things to wear for our engagement party or my bridal shower, a cute piece or two to wear for engagement photos, and dresses to wear for friends' upcoming weddings. Bring on the shopping! 😀
I'm well overdue to recap the amazing Puerto Rico trip that I went on last summer with my friend Liane! We stayed at the well-known Caribe Hilton in San Juan, which quickly became one of my favorite Hilton properties that I've ever stayed at. I truly don't think that we could've found a better hotel for the trip that was both of our first times in Puerto Rico! Excited to recap this wonderful hotel for you today. And very soon I'll be sharing a San Juan Travel Guide, too!
In 2022, I was able to read 45 books! That's the most I've read since 2019, when it was one of my resolutions to read 52 books (a book a week). I was shooting for 40 this year, but all of the time that I spent sick last summer gave me a ton of time to get ahead on reading, and I knocked out some extra titles thanks to that.
I would say that the majority of books that I read I rate at three or four stars. I am pretty picky with what books I will give my coveted five-star rating to. 2022 brought me a ton of three star reads, but also eight stand-out books that got my five-star rating! Here were my favorite books of the year:
Where do Southern small-town charm, rich local history, and a luxurious inn stay come together? At The Captain's Quarters and Granville Queen Inns in beautiful Edenton, NC! I'm excited to share my review of these two sister properties (owened by The Carolina Experience) with y'all today. Plus- stay tuned to the end of the post for a discount code for your future NC travels.
Popping in just before Halloween to share a pop culturally trendy and very easy couples costume that I came up with: Love is Blind!
