We are overjoyed to announce that United With Love, a local blog that looks for fresh inspiration in DC area weddings has featured this wedding. You can see Amanda and Bishop’s wedding blog post here.
This wedding is very near and dear to my heart because I know Amanda personally from the wedding industry. It is the ultimate compliment when a wedding vendor chooses us to photograph their special day. Thank you Amanda!
Amanda & Bishop met during the police academy in December of 2015. They were then both assigned to the same precinct but assigned to opposite shifts. It was challenging to coordinate seeing each other, but they made it work. They are both currently police officers in Baltimore County today.
In addition to being a police officer, Amanda is also a custom wedding invitation and paper product designer. Her company is called, Amanda Childs Paperie & Designs. Her custom paper company has grown so much since we first met that she now offers design pieces such as acrylic signage, custom displays, copper arch displays, and rental items in addition to the bespoke paper products she has always offered. I am so excited to see the future of Amanda Childs Paperie & Designs. She is incredibly creative and has an eye for making things cohesive.
I will let her tell you in her own words how she came up with the look and feel of her wedding:
“Bishop and I both have a love for the outdoors. We took his love of hunting and my childhood lifestyle of growing up on a farm as inspiration for our wedding. We wanted to create something elegant while incorporating the farming outdoors feel at the same time. I loved the idea of a lot of greenery with pops of burgundy, rose gold, and light grey for our color palette. We also incorporated the use of deer antlers and a variety acrylic signage. We included the deer antler design with sprigs of greenery and a vellum wrap in our invitation. We also created a custom logo for our wedding that was used for entrance signs and as the invitation wax seal.
Bishop and I love any excuse for a road trip and have traveled to twenty plus states. We incorporated this by labeling our table numbers as the states we have visited. For our escort display we did an oversized canvas of ombre style envelopes where our guests could “find their destination.” We also could not resist adding a donut wall as a play on our job considering that most of our guests were also police officers.
Another personal touch we added was the custom handmade bar tops by my dad. These tops were made from wood that he had cut down when he first built my childhood home over thirty years ago. This wood also served as was the bases to the acrylic signage. The bars were not only a nostalgic sentiment for the wedding but also a great addition to our new home together.
The last piece about our wedding that really stands out is our venue. We stressed over finding the perfect venue that would allow us to do all that we wanted. We searched for weeks and finally found this hidden gem. It has ten bedrooms on the upper part of the barn where it accommodated our entire bridal party and then some. It has a great room with a huge kitchen where we held the rehearsal dinner and brunch the next morning. It was so relaxing and the view that surrounded us all weekend was just breath taking. This venue offered us more than we could have ever imagined from being able to have our bridal party stay with us all weekend, to allowing the guys to have target practice the morning of. The owners of this venue were so nice and easy to work with.”
Thank you Amanda for sharing all of those really special details and how they all tie together with your past, your present, and your future. This wedding was incredibly fun and I learned that night how cops really know how to party down!
One of my favorite parts of the day was early in the morning, Bishop let me accompany him, some friends, and his father to photograph them skeet shooting. That’s right folks, I said shooting, with a real riffle, and I was there for it, shaking in my boots. We also added in Bishop’s favorite handgun into his flat lay. I have to admit, I was profusely sweating as I gingerly adjusted the gun in the photo, but I made it through. It was 100% worth it to photograph something outside of my comfort zone and I am so happy I did.
