Jadoregrace Southern Lifestyle Blog

Building Our Perfect Wedding Album with Artifact Uprisng

7:00 AM

*Thank you to Artifact Uprising for sponsoring this post*

www.jadoregrace.com / Building Our Perfect Wedding Album with Artifact Uprising

I have had my eye on the Artifact Uprising Layflat Album since I got engaged. I remember looking at wedding album rates (going upwards of $500) and thinking, there HAS to be a way to get an album that is not only affordable but beautiful and customizable. That’s where Artifact Uprising comes in.

Artifact Uprising JUST came out with a beautiful line of limited edition lay flat colors. They are Emerald, Honeycomb, Rose, and Sedona. Beautiful and rich colors that I fell in love with at first sight. When I saw “Rose” I knew that I just had to have our wedding album in this color!

Limited Edition Colors (from left to right): Rose, Emerald, Sedona, Honeycomb

Your Layflat Album Size Options

When I say that the artifact uprising Layflat album is completely customizable, I’m not kidding. First, you have your pick of five different album sizes. The sizes vary from 8.5x8.5” to 14x11”.

My pick: I went with the 8.5 x 8.5” album, I didn’t want the album to overpower our coffee table and I also wanted to keep within budget and maximize the number of pages that I could put into the album.

Your Layflat Foil Color Options

This is probably one of my favorite features. Having the beautiful title of your album engraved with these foil colors is just about the best thing. (Does anybody else get excited about these things?!) You have a choice of gold, silver, copper, and white.

My pick: Gold, our wedding colors were blush, gold, and forest green so this was just fitting.

Your Layflat Paper Options

You have two paper options to pick from-- Superfine and Lustre.

My pick: I went with the Superfine paper, I loved that it would have a textured eggshell finish. Our wedding was rustic, very DIY and I wanted the album to reflect that. Having a textured paper was more representative of our wedding than a perfectly polished paper type.

Building Your Layflat Photo Album

Your album will start at $139 if you start with the most basic 8.5x8.5” album like I did!

From this point, the process of creating your album is SO easy.

Each album starts with 20 pages (10 spreads) and each additional page will vary anywhere from $4.60 to $6.00 depending on the album size you choose for yourself. Each album has a max of 70 pages.

If at any point during your building process, you decide you want to change your album size, you also have the capability to do that!

Ability to change album size

Tips to Follow

Before I started building our album, I followed the tips from Artifact Uprising’s “7 Tips For Building Your Best Wedding Photo Album” And also had their “The Anatomy of A Wedding Album” pulled up in a tab for inspiration.

The Process

Once you upload the pictures that you have curated for your album, Artifact Uprising will suggest layouts for your first 10 spreads. You have the ability to change the layouts by clicking on the “layouts” tab at the bottom of the page.

If you need to at any point pause the building process, you can save and pick up again at any time on the website!

Website Functionality

I have to give big props to Artifact Uprising for how user-friendly their website and particularly the album building pages are. Not once did I question where I would have to click to build the design I wanted for my album. It’s an amazingly simple design and quite representative of the product you will end up with through them. Our wedding album is BEAUTIFUL, with a clean minimalistic design that I was able to create!

The website to build the album

Ordering and Delivery

Right before you order your album, you have the ability to preview it by actually virtually flipping through the album to see how the pictures look aligned with your pages. It's called the "Coffee Table Preview". This was really helpful for me because I was able to see if some margins actually didn’t look as great as I thought they would!

Artifact Uprising: Coffee Table Preview

After ordering, the album was delivered to me within a week! I’m thoroughly impressed with how easy and pleasant the experience was and I will definitely be making another album with them very soon!

Get a Layflat Album!

Take advantage of their limited edition Layflat colors and save 10% by using the code “SAVESUMMER” through this Thursday!

Or take advantage of my code "JADOREGRACE10" for 10% off SITEWIDE, it'll end next Monday August 20th, so go ahead and see what Artifact Uprising has to offer!

MAINE

What to Do in Portland, Maine in 8 Hours!

7:00 AM

I got this beautiful postcard from an oil painter who is posted up right next to the Portland Head lighthouse with various prints of his art. I loved this one!

It's July which means that we only have a mere three weekends left to enjoy this city. Since both Joe and I work during the week, we knew that we really had to use our time on the weekends wisely. Our last two weekends in July are filled with wedding-related activities so in reality, we only had two weekends left to enjoy Boston. Just thinking about it makes me want to cry! How did the time go by so quickly?!

This is why Joe and I decided to take a very spontaneous trip to Portland, Maine last weekend. We literally didn't have anything planned and just kind of planned things on the go like finding public transportation (since we don't have our car), finding things to do, etc.

Joe would have been so against the idea of taking a spontaneous trip about three years ago but I tend to be a very spontaneous person so I think he's started to get used to my spontaneous requests. The both of us knew that we wanted to go to Maine so he actually got right on board with me.

Friday Night: I quickly googled a way for us to get to Portland, Maine and we decided to take the train! It was going to be a 2.5-hour ride for us from Boston. This was perfect because we could use our time on the train to look up things to do while in Portland!

Getting from Boston to Portland, Maine via Train: You'll want to take the train from North Station. Tickets are $29 per person one-way (we purchased ours on a Saturday). There are some wide gaps in the times that the train leaves so I would plan in advance to board a train in time to make it into Portland, Maine at a decent time.

Transportation once in Portland, Maine: With our itinerary, we definitely had to take advantage of lyft. We didn't really know how to work the buses in Portland and the sights we wanted to see weren't exactly walking distance!

Saturday: We slept in a bit because we had been entertaining my brother and friend that week so we recovered from that a bit and then went on our merry way to Portland, Maine! I didn't quite line up the time for getting on the train very well and we ended up having to wait at the train station until 4:15 PM to even start the 2.5-hour ride. This meant that we'd get into Portland after 7 PM and really only have time to grab dinner and not much else.

Realizing this, we decided to book a hotel room in Portland, Maine on the fly. This is not the first time that we've done this so I was actually quite ready for a mediocre hotel experience (haha!). There weren't any airbnbs available because of how soon we were trying to book a room. (The lesson here is to plan trips in advance, but spontaneous trips can still happen). We didn't have any of our toiletries, no change of clothes, etc!!! I hate myself for even admitting publicly that this happened but seriously, this was the most spontaneous of spontaneous trips.

Things to do in Portland, Maine in 8 Hours

Take advantage of the time that you have to check out the amazing food scene in Portland, Maine and try getting different courses at different restaurants! We decided to do an appetizer, entree, and drinks at three different locations and it was so fun! If you are there on a weekend you will have waits from 1 hour - 1.5 hours (for even just a party of two) so I would recommend preparing yourself to be ready to do lots of waiting.

1) APPETIZER: Get fries at DuckFat.

They fry their fries in duck fat so of course it's automatically amazing. The fries come with some unique sauces, we got the curry mayo and the Thai chili mayo. Both were amazing! If you want to avoid the wait, DuckFat does have a food truck that's a five-minute walk from their restaurant where they regularly serve the fries. We totally missed this sign but if we had seen it we would have done it to avoid the hour wait!

2) ENTREES: Get the brown butter lobster roll from Eventide.

Most other lobster rolls are served cold but this one is warm, the lobster meat is extra succulent from the butter and overall it is absolutely amazing! We also got the lobster stew but I wish I had gone with some clam chowder. They also serve oysters some fresh from the Portland, Maine area I would definitely take advantage of these oysters if you can!!

3) Grab drinks from Portland Hunt & Alpine Club.

They have a cocktail menu that has drinks that are either Refreshing, Adventurous, Classics, and Wild Card. SO FUN! I got the Clove Hitch which was great. The Lavender Collins was my second pick of the night!

Cocktail menu at Portland Hunt & Alpine Club

4) Get donuts from The Holy Donut.

After getting a good night of sleep, we headed to The Holy Donut for breakfast. Our hotel actually served breakfast and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity to save some money, it would honestly have been overkill if we got brunch. However, if we had gone to Brunch The Bayside American Cafe would have been our first pick!

From top to bottom: Blueberry, Berry Cannoli, and Coffeecake

The blueberry donut was a seasonal one and had a 75 cent upcharge. My absolute favorite was the berry cannoli, the cream in the middle is this slightly sweet lemony tart cream that pairs perfectly with the berry donut. Seriously. It was AWESOME!

5) Check out the Portland Head Lighthouse

Aside from the food, this was definitely our favorite part of our trip to Portland. The Portland head lighthouse has more than 3 miles of land surrounding it with amazing trails that you can spend a good amount of time walking on. The views are amazing and when the weather is nice, this place is the bomb. Every picture that you get of the lighthouse will honestly look perfect.

There's a cute gelato stand on-site as well as a lobster roll food truck that probably opens close to lunchtime. You can definitely have a picnic enjoy the scenery here. It's beautiful!

After getting a good amount of time at the lighthouse area, we headed back to the train station to purchase tickets and get back to Boston at a decent time to do the things we needed to do to get ready for the work week. Man, I usually don't experience Sunday Scaries but I was kind of feeling it that Sunday! Overall, it was an amazing trip because of the amazing company (shoutout to my hubby!), great food, beautiful weather, and a very cool city!