In May of this year (2019), my then fiancé and I hopped on a plane and traveled to Italy. Mission: get married. (Long story of how we ended up eloping to Rome, we will just say lots of drawbridges). When we decided to elope to Rome, one of the first things we needed to find was a photographer. So with the help of Google, we found a photographer to capture our big day. (Rochelle Cheever)

Little did we know how absolutely incredible Rochelle would be. She was one of, if not the key factor, in making our big day as close to perfect as it could have been.

While stopping around Rome for pictures, Rochelle would pull out a light meter and just rave at how beautiful the light was. This led to us (me-Joe), to giving Rochelle a hard time all day long about the beautiful light. Luckily for us Rochelle had an awesome sense of humor and this made for an inside joke that will last forever.A

A month or so after our wedding Rochelle sent us our thumb drive with our pictures, a cool little ring dish, and a note that said not to forget the light meter. Super thoughtful and awesome surprise. So we wanted to send a thank you gift back to show her our appreciation.

It has started to become a tradition with some of our past customers to add a little something extra with their order, an ornament of our home state (Indiana) and one of theirs. To the CNC I went. I had some cherry left over and made ornaments of Indiana, California, and Italy. But this wasn’t enough. I had to find a way to make something that resembled a light meter. I custom designed a light meter ornament from cherry with walnut inlays. Now every Christmas, Rochelle will look at her tree and say how beautiful it is.

This was one of the most fun and meaningful projects. I got to up my CNC game and designed something completely from scratch. If I had to bet, I think there will be more Christmas ornaments on the horizon.