Merry Christmas from the Holmes Family! (Pictures from the Drukes, Carolina, and our Christmas Card)

Merry Christmas Everyone! I hope you all are having a wonderful Christmas Eve! We have had busy last few days. We had a wonderful time in Chapel Hill and then a nice easy flight up to New Hampshire where we had a great time last night at Jamie and Josh's Christmas party. I went over yesterday morning and Jamie and I finished decorating her's and Josh's home for their Christmas party. Here are some photos. (I showed some pictures of her dining room that we did last time I was here in a previous post so I won't repost any of those to keep this post from getting too long!)

Here is their great room:

And here is their entryway which is my absolute FAVORITE but was impossible to find a good spot to stand in to photograph it. I think I need a wider lens for spots like this. These photos don't begin to show what it really looks like. I am so incredibly jealous of her new mirror!

And here is their newly finished breakfast nook. Josh made the table!

We also had a lot of fun in Chapel Hill on Tuesday although the game against Carolina didn't go quite like we would have liked =(. Lillie didn't seem to mind though, seeing how we sat directly behind the players and she could basically poke them all night long! =)

 Here she is after enjoying a candycane.

Sitting on the bench after the game.

Lillie and our cousin Lauren.

 She was in love with Blake.

And since arriving in New Hampshire Lillie has enjoyed plowing with Papa.

And here is our Christmas card. I was going to take a photo of it but haven't gotten to it so instead I will just upload the front, inside and back. 

Merry Christmas to you all from the Holmes Family!!!

I hope you all have a blessed Christmas Eve and a beautiful day tomorrow!

PS - Don't forget to scroll down and enter our BIG giveaway!

A BIG DEAR LILLIE GIVEAWAY and Some Downloadable Gift Tags!

Whew! What a week! I am so glad it is over and am so excited about this week!!!! Today Lillie and I head off to Chapel Hill where we are hoping to meet up with some childhood friends for dinner and then off to my aunt and uncle's house where we will spend the night and the day tomorrow before heading over to UNC for the William and Mary vs. Carolina game. Jon and I both went to college there and Jon played basketball there so it will be a little weird rooting against the Tarheels but I think we will manage. We are so excited to bring Lillie to the Smith Center for the first time and show her around and let her see her Daddy's old locker and stuff. The game is on ESPNU at 7PM Eastern Time (Tuesday night) for any of you that are basketball fans that get ESPNU. If Lillie makes it on TV again this year I hope she will be clapping or cheering and not be busy sulking because I have cut off her supply of M&M's and soda for the night! Then after the game we head back here to crawl in bed for a few hours before heading up to NH! And then yay - our Christmas begins! I am so excited! 


Now, onto some decorating (and then after that the giveaway!) I finally got all of our presents wrapped early Sunday morning and then when Lillie went down for her nap after church I started working on tagging them all. I had ordered some really adorable tags from a great little Etsy shop about a month ago but they never arrived. I contacted the seller and she resent them but they still haven't gotten here so I was left scrambling. Once I put Lillie down I was kicking myself because I realized that I was out of almost all of my ribbon and out of most of my colored cardstock! Argggh! And of course because she was napping I couldn't head out to pick anything more up and Jon wasn't going to be home from practice for several more hours. So, I ended up just using what I had which certainly saved a lot of money, however, they didn't end up how I had envisioned them in my head. =(  Normally, I like to use little ornaments or other things to decorate my gifts with but this year because we were going to be shipping almost all of our gifts for our families I just did things REALLY simple. And because I only had an hour  I just used designs I had already done this year (instead of some new ones I had in my head) and printed them out four to a page on some ivory cardstock and then cut them into circles or rectangles and then cut slightly larger circles and rectangles and used double stick tape to stick them together. Then I just punched a tiny hole in the top and that was it! It took just over an hour to do about 30 or so of them so it was a really quick and easy project and the best part - it was FREE! They are definitely NOT my favorite wrapping jobs ever but at least they are done now and all on their way!

Here are just few of them!  I took pictures of the first handful that I finished and then Lillie woke up and helped me with the rest of them. 

Once I ran out of all of my ivory scrap ribbon I had to pull out some of this cheetah print - yikes! Haha - I like it for some other things but it was not exactly the look I was going for as far as wrapping Christmas gifts went, but it was all I had left! Time to stock back up on some ribbon!!!!

I printed mine straight from Illustrator but I still haven't figured out how to upload PDF Files so I had to save these as JPG's to upload into blogger. I saved them quite large though so they shouldn't be too blurry. Just click on any of the images and they will open larger in another window. I would recommend saving them and then printing them from Preview or whatever program you have that will open JPG's. I just tried doing it that way and they actually printed pretty crisply. 

To save on packing and avoiding having to bring things up to NH and then back again, we did our Christmas with Lillie last night. She was so excited to open Curious George and some toys and books but still not so keen on opening clothes!

Okay, and now onto our GIVEAWAY!!!!!

We will draw a winner for a $75 gift certificate to our shop!

So, how can you win?

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post!

You don't have to have a blog to enter, either. If you aren't a blogger, just enter a comment and then where it says "comment as" scroll down near the bottom and click on anonymous. However, if you do that, make sure to leave your e-mail address in the comment so that we can contact you if you win! If you have a blog or a profile where we can get your e-mail address then you don't need to worry about that part. If we draw the name of someone who we have no way of contacting we will simply draw a new name.

You can comment each day if you would like to up your chances!

For an extra entry become a follower of our blog!

Just write "follower" as your comment so it counts as an entry.

We will draw the winner on January 1st and the winner can use their gift certificate once we reopen our shop after the holidays.

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!

A Few Exciting Things!

My blogging has been slacking again lately. I have been crawling in bed between three and four most nights this week and then Lillie wakes up around 7:30 full of energy and ready to start the day. The good news is I have officially gotten ALL of our Dear Lillie packages shipped. I got most of them out Thursday and the last few out Friday once paypal shipping started cooperating again. So everyone that ordered things from us this week should have them by Monday or Tuesday, I would think! Ahhh - it is such a relief to have that taken care of. I also finally got most of our one hundred Christmas cards finished, although I still have a handful I need to get addresses for. Lillie and I finished our Christmas shopping today and starting on the wrapping tonight. Oh my - talk about taking forever! Wrapping presents used to be one of my absolute favorite things to do, but with Lillie helping it is quickly becoming one of my least favorite things - haha! Oh well.

Anyway, onto the exciting things:

First: I am officially past the half-way mark of my pregnancy - yay!!!!!!!

Second: We had another sonogram on Thursday and although they had told us at our last sonogram they thought it was a girl it was still pretty early to tell for sure. Well on Thursday they said it was 

MOST DEFINITELY A GIRL

YAY!!!!!! Needless to say, I am really really excited! After Christmas I can't wait to get started on her nursery! We have all of the big things from Lillie but it will still be fun to paint and do some decorating and change our guest room into a nursery!

(This is actually a picture from our last sonogram because my scanner is refusing to cooperate right now so I can't post pictures from our latest sonogram where she is much bigger! Once my scanner decides to be agreeable I will change this out for a more recent shot.) 

And THIRD (but not nearly as exciting as the first two) : We have officially hit the 1000 follower mark so for our next post we will have another giveaway!!!! I am going to try to do it before we head to Chapel Hill on Monday!

I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend!

Joyeux Noel Sharpie Pillows, More Christmas Decorating and SNOW!

Whew! It has been a pretty crazy forty-eight hours or so here! Lillie and I got to Logan at about 6:45 or so Sunday night to discover our 7:50 flight was delayed until 10:15 thanks to some nasty weather. We actually were a bit worried we might not get out at all as they had canceled the flight to Richmond. Fortunately, we were flying into Newport News and that one did make it out. Needless to say hanging out at the airport for hours while pregnant and with a toddler is not really high on my list of ways to spend a Sunday evening. However, I really can't complain because Lillie picked the perfect time to be on her absolute best behavior! I seriously don't think I have ever been so proud of her! She made friends with every child under the age of twelve that was anywhere in our vicinity and spent most of the time coloring and playing with them and even snuggling up to two girls who were watching Elf! Fortunately they were old enough to find it cute that she thought every scene was funny and didn't find it annoying that she kept pointing and laughing and calling Will Ferrell, "Unka Jason". I am so anti-social I am always amazed that she is my child - haha! We also discovered we were on the same flight as "Coach Ben" (one of the other assistants at William and Mary who had been up in Boston recruiting) and I think Lillie was pretty excited to see a familiar face because she is normally pretty shy around him - but not on Sunday! She was quite excited to see him and kept wanting to make sure he was nearby. 

We did finally make it home a between midnight and one and then it was back to the grind. I didn't think we would sell much this week but instead it has been quite busy and so I have been desperately trying to keep up with convos, sales and e-mails and seeing how both of my girls who helped me package aren't available this week (one with finals and the other with a new full-time job) I am trying to get everything packaged up and shipped on out too. I also normally have all of my Christmas presents bought and wrapped by now but this year am so far behind - as of this morning I could count on one hand the gifts we have bought so far and I don't have a single thing wrapped - ahhhh! And on top of that I still am slowly trying to get my files transferred onto my new computer. 

So, because of all of that, I want to first let everyone that I owe an e-mail to, to please know that I haven't forgotten you (both personal e-mails and Dear Lillie e-mails) I am just dreadfully and horribly behind but I promise I will respond! And second, we are going to be closing our shop tomorrow (Wednesday) night instead of Friday and won't be reopening until the beginning of January. I had originally planned on keeping it open until Friday, but without any help I am already having trouble keeping up with orders and so if I close tomorrow night I will still be able to get everything ordered out by Friday and then will have the weekend to get my Christmas shopping finished and get things wrapped and mailed on out before we leave on Monday. Wow - I forgot how crazy this time of year is! (And of course we have basketball games to go to and a sonogram on Thursday to squeeze in where we should find out for sure what we are having - yay - I can't wait or that!!!!!!)

So, anyway, that is the update on all of that. I didn't mean to write such a novel but just wanted to explain why we were closing our shop early. I didn't mean to ramble so much - sorry about that!

Here are some decorating pictures from New Hampshire. My sister, Jamie and her husband Josh are having a Christmas party at their new house on the 23rd so I helped her start decorating for it. We got her dining room completely done and made progress on her entry-way, kitchen and great room. 

One of the first things we did was make her some pillows like the Silent Nights ones I did for my living room. Just like last time I just used a good ol' Sharpie, but this time freehanded the words Joyeux Noel onto two pieces of fabric and she sewed them up. I have decided I am going to make these to sell in our shop next year along with the Silent Night and Holy Night ones, however, I am going to screenprint them so they look a bit nicer. I will still freehand the words but will scan them in and then have them screenprinted because although we got requests for them this year I did not feel comfortable selling something that was just drawn with a sharpie!

When I get back up there for Christmas I will take pictures of this whole room but we didn't finish it so I wanted to wait until it was done before showing you the rest of the room. For now, though, here are the two pillows. We did them in a SUPER hurry so pardon the fact that they are a bit lumpy and Jamie actually hadn't quite finished sewing them when I took the pictures. 

The one room we did finish was the dining room. We went really simple in here. Everything  is fresh - either from Burdick's or from  a trip out to the woods! 

I really can't wait to show you her entry-way once it is completely done but here is the start we got to it. Jamie and Josh are staining the stairs a dark brown to match their floors this week and then on the other side of the entry Jamie just ordered a mirror that I am soooooooooooo incredibly jealous of! I will definitely be taking some pictures of that to show you all when I head back up there for Christmas!

 I changed the Silent Night to brown for her (you can download it in green from this post) and she put it in this frame. I will show you the rest of the entry-way pics once it is done.

  I can't wait to show you some pictures of her kitchen, bedroom and the rest of the great room and entryway but that will have to wait until I am back up in New England next week!

Another project we worked on was my parent's Christmas tree. They had it up and had started decorating it but hadn't finished because they knew I hadn't gotten to decorate a tree yet this year and figured I might enjoy getting to help (although I showed all of the other decorating we have done in our house this Christmas we STILL haven't gotten our tree because it would have died while we were gone for that ten day stretch and seeing how we are leaving again on Monday I think we may not even bother at this point). I was really inspired by a tree I saw on the Old Painted Cottage Blog and wanted to do something that had a similar feel but didn't want to go out and buy anything so we just used stuff my parents already had. 

My mom and Jamie ripped out pages from an old hymnal we had and rolled them and then tied them with extra fabric from the stockings my mom made for the mantle this year. I took pictures of those but they all came out horribly blurry. I will try again when I go back up there because they were really beautiful.

The drummer boys are only half done.  We just printed them on cardstock and stuck them on the tree so I could take pictures before I left. They still need to be distressed a little to look old and have holes punched in them and hung.

Oh and here are two quick shots to prove that we did have snow here in Williamsburg. We woke up yesterday morning to a nice little blanket of it! 

I hope you all are having a wonderful week and are a bit further ahead than I am on buying and wrapped Christmas gifts! Off to write some convos and then start packaging up orders!