Hi everyone!  I am excited to announce that yesterday I launched a new blogging venture, Edit and Post.  Edit and Post will encourage you to think more closely about your blog, about your business, and about your goals.  And of course, we’ll hopefully have a little bit of fun along the way.

If you are bloggers or small business owners, I would love for you to stop by Edit and Post and take a peek!

xo,
Ami

Hi everyone!  I just wanted to let you know that you now have the option to receive EAD Living in your inbox.  Simply click on the link below to subscribe – email is delivered via Feedburner once per day.

Subscribe to EAD Living via e-mail

You can also find the e-mail subscription link, along with links to subscribe via RSS, add to Google Reader, or follow my Twitter feed in the follow and subscribe section of the sidebar.

I hope you’re having a wonderful weekend!

xoxo,
Ami

By now, ya’ll know that I love two things: 1) adorable puppies and 2) beautiful stationery. Well Lydia and Pugs combines both, and I’m so thrilled to partner with them to give away a set of custom notecards to one EAD reader!

The winner will receive a custom Lydia and Pugs drawing and 12 printed notecards (with coordinating envelopes).  To enter, just leave a comment below letting us know why you and your furbaby would love these notecards.  Tweets with the URL of this post will also be counted.  The winner will be chosen at 12pm central on Friday.

GOOD LUCK!

Update – congrats to our winner, Lori!

I’m thrilled to partner with Pose Prints, one of EAD Weddings’ fabulous sponsors, to give one lucky EAD reader their choice of 75 cards or 50 magnets in their choice of design and style!

It’s just too fun to make a caricature of yourself isn’t it? To win, just comment below and let us know what you would choose. Tweets linking to the post will count as entries as well. One lucky winner will be chosen Friday, January 8th at noon.

Good luck!

I know I am!  If you’re a procrastinator too and are looking for some holiday card goodness, enter Rebecca from The Pink Orange.  She’s giving away two boxes of her letterpress holiday notecards to one lucky reader!

For your chance to win, simply comment below with your favorite holiday tradition.  Winner chooses style of cards from her collection and will receive two boxes of 6 cards.  We’ll close the contest and choose our winner Thursday 12/10 at 5pm central, so good luck!

Update: congrats to our winner, Jen!

Hi and welcome! I’m so excited to unveil the new Elizabeth Anne Designs. If you’re reading via RSS, here’s a little peek at the changes…

I’m so grateful to Carolynn from Two Brunettes for her design inspiration and Laura Hooper for the fabulous flourishes you see around the site.

I hope you enjoy the new Elizabeth Anne Designs and thank you all so much for being my daily inspiration!

xo – Ami

(image via larskflem)

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve disappeared to this past month, here’s the answer: I’ve been dealing with a pretty serious issue, one that’s left me basically incapacitated. No, I’m not talking about swine flu. I’m talking about the dreaded Writer’s Block.

Have you ever felt like you’ve lost your creative mojo? It’s like I’ve run out of steam. For a while I was maintaining three blogs. Besides writing for EAD Living, I had my personal blog and my business blog. I thought I could keep my life separated into neat, little compartments, but that’s turned out to be pretty hard to do. And coming up with topics to discuss on a daily basis for three outlets has suddenly become very overwhelming. Despite living an active life, I find myself blanking out on what to write about when staring at the computer screen. Even writing this post has been challenging!

So I ask you, fellow EAD Living bloggers and readers, how do you unlock your creativity? For those of you who write for several outlets, how do you come up with a multitude of ideas every day?

For a lot of newlyweds the first few months of marriage are spent nesting – carefully unpacking and displaying wedding gifts, inviting friends over for dinner parties, contemplating home decor and getting those new pots and pans dirty in the kitchen. Well, at the end of this week we’ll officially have been married for three months and I can happily admit to largely ignoring all of that thus far. While many of our gifts are stowed away, I still have stacks of glassware and serving platters to contend with and we’ve only had visitors over once. I haven’t even unpacked all of the big bins full of wedding decorations. Those are languishing away stacked up against the back wall of our home office. Instead, I’ve been putting all of my energy into the launch of my new blog The Sweetest Occasion.

A few years ago I began coordinating weddings for friends and family members. I’ve always been obsessed with making and checking items off of to-do lists and I’ve always been obsessed with design – it seemed natural that I sort of evolved into filling this role for loved ones. With my undergraduate degree in architecture, I have an educated understanding of space planning and creating environments that are welcoming visually as well as being highly functional. With a Master of Business Administration, I have a keen awareness of organizational systems, marketing and branding. The more I dabbled in helping friends with their weddings, the more I fell in love with doing so. Somewhere along the way I started blogging and by word of mouth picked up a few clients for coordinating jobs, brides who found me through one blog or another. I got engaged, became fully immersed in the blog world, landed my dream job working for one of the premiere letterpress print shops in the country and have continued my obsession with weddings and events of all kinds as well as for writing, dreaming and inspiring.

All of this culminated in my getting married, going on a honeymoon, getting home and almost immediately pulling together some of the most talented people I know including E, who is not only the mastermind behind EAD but also my dear dear friend, to help me realize my dream of a website that is both supportive of my hopes to continue the fun I have coordinating weddings part time and to give me an outlet for the creativity in my brain, the things that inspire me daily. The Sweetest Occasion will be about all things weddings, of course, but it will also be a source of stylish inspiration for all of life’s many occasions – birthdays, anniversaries, engagements, graduations, dinner parties, July 4th barbecues, surprise 30th birthday parties and so so much more. I would love for you to come visit and tell me what you think – I can’t wait to share with you all the bottled up inspiration I have saved up!

(And, my husband can’t wait for our typically organized house to get whipped back into shape, but that’s another for another post entirely.)

PS  – Of course, I’ll still be here at EADL each week too!

ABCD Design is celebrating it’s SECOND Blog-i-versary on October 7th! I wanted to celebrate in a really big way as a thank you to all my lovely readers. When it comes to birthdays and anniversaries, what would you say is the best part? Yep, you got it. The presents! I figure when push comes to shove – what’s a blog-i-versary without prizes? I am super excited about the first ABCD Design gift because it is…

Since I design stationery for weddings, new babies and other big social events, I figured this milestone in life should be marked with a Bespoke Stationery giveaway! The winner will receive a completely bespoke personal stationery design by (yours truly) ABC Dragoo.

{Read the rest of this entry…}

Darling readers, so sorry for my prolonged absence from EAD Living recently. Things have been mighty busy Chez Rachel & Husband but I hope things are settling down now. Some of the things I have been busy with include but are not limited to:

* London Fashion Week. Miele (or, the washing machine people, as like to refer to them) invited me, along with a few other bloggers, to attend the Jasper Garvida show and these are some of the photographs I have time to download and edit from the camera that Canon were kind enough to lend me:

* As some of you may know, I was made redundant just before our wedding in June. Since then I have been for many interviews but am still not in full time employment. I am however boosting my CV with various unpaid freelance projects including learning the PR ropes in a friend’s new PR business. I also spend every Sunday helping out in a beautiful vintage shop.

* Attending weddings. Aside from our own we have been to a further 4 weddings this summer with another still to come this year and another two at least next year. I do so love weddings and at some point will be writing further about this.

* Watching Gossip Girl. Series 2 suddenly appeared on our TV choice thing and I have to admit, Husband and I have spent a fair few evenings enjoying our new Sunday evening routine: roast dinner and a film/TV evening, together. Turns out GG is a good compromise.

* Cooking. We have started having our vegetables delivered from a local organic farm delivery service and have very much enjoyed the process of cooking more local and seasonal food, together, in the evenings. Turns out that I do a good line in veggie lasagne.

* Hosting birthday parties. With cupcakes and bunting and homemade pizza and pasta. It’s a fun way to host a party: make pizza dough, tomato sauce and plain homemade pasta and ask the guests to bring the toppings.

When written down like that it doesn’t seem too bad but combined with all the usual things one must fit into a week, it’s felt like I’ve barely had time to sleep recently.

I hope you are all enjoying the onset of Autumn/Fall. More to come on that note soon.

xoxo