An Audrey Hepburn Invitation and Miss Mustard Seed

 (Sorry for the blurry picture...I have been trying to shoot Lillie in our new Calla Tutu for two weeks and she has not been cooperative. 

Sadly, that's the best of the bunch and you can't even see the tutu and it's out of focus.)

Yesterday was one of those nice, relaxing, wonderfully simple days!  Our life has been pretty hectic lately. I am up every night working until anywhere from 2 to 4 am,  and this time of year Jon is gone quite a bit and even when he isn't on the road with games or recruiting there are some LONG days. It has been a particularly exhausting basketball season. Last year was the best year in William and Mary history and I think I bored you all with constant updates of exciting win after exciting win. This year has been the opposite with heartbreaking loss after heartbreaking loss (our last game we were up three and the team we were playing hit a three in the final seconds to send it to overtime and then hit a half court shot at the buzzer in overtime to beat us - that shot actually made it to number two on Sports Centers Top Ten Plays that night - argghhhh! So, needless to say it has been a rather long year). Well, the weekend got off to a great start with the Tribe winning their ESPN Bracketbuster game by 32 on Saturday night. That made for a very happy Jon on Sunday! In fact, after the game was over, Lillie exclaimed that Daddy was "sooooooooooo happy!" Haha! Anyway, after church we decided to just enjoy the day with Lillie instead of worrying about all of the things that needed to get done and it was so much fun. We hadn't had a day like that in so long. I have always loved that quote on the photo above (from one of my favorite books as a child, Anne of Avonlea), and it seemed to fit yesterday perfectly. Unfortunately, now it is back to the grind! Haha!

During Lillie's nap yesterday, I FINALLY got my orders placed with all of my different suppliers for our new spring items. I am hoping they will be in this coming this week and then the screenprinting will begin and then hopefully they will be ready to list in our shop either two weeks from today or three weeks from today. I originally had about 50 new styles but panicked knowing that we were going to be closing our shop in mid April for a little while with the new baby coming so I ended up cutting it down to about half. I also cut out all of the new designs except for one because I felt like I rushed through them and when I have done that in the past I have always ended up not liking those designs. So, instead, I am just printing one new design (on several different styles) and then am printing our most popular designs (like the Fairyland and Jane Austen ones) on a whole bunch of new shirts, tanks, sweatshirts and totes. There are two styles in particular that I am really excited about! I spent three days narrowing down my orders and it was a relief to finally have them sent off to our suppliers. Our shop has been pretty low on stock for a while now so it will be nice to fill it back up with some new items! I am also hoping to have some new pillows available ready to list next week but am not sure yet if I will get them done in time.

Once that was done I had time to photograph the invitation we made for my sister Dana's birthday party. Our sister, Jamie and her husband are coming down later this week for a visit and we would throw a little party for Dana seeing how her birthday is next week. She loves Audrey Hepburn and we thought it would be fun to throw her a Audrey Hepburn/Breakfast at Tiffany's themed party. We started talking about doing this about a month or so ago, and I had a bunch of ideas in my head for it but so far haven't had time to work on any of them. So, it's going to be way more simple than I had planned for but that's alright. It will still be fun and I will show you pictures of whatever projects we do get finished once they are done.

For now, here are the invitations:
 (This is the envelope part - if you pull on the little black velvet loop the actual invitation slides out)

On another note, I am sure you all that read blogs have heard of Marian of Miss Mustard Seed. She is has a fabulous blog and does the most amazing furniture transformations. I have been addicted to her blog since the day I first ran across it. She has had quite a lot of exciting things happening for her lately including being featured in several magazines lately and she also writes for HGTV.com! Anyway, she recently hosted a contest called the "Copy Me Challenge" and we decided to enter. It was the first time we had entered a contest before so I didn't think anything would come of it but figured it would be fun to enter. Well, she announced her top five finalists yesterday and we were one of them! We were so excited and honored to be featured on her blog. So, we just wanted to say a quick thank you to her!

Also my favorite photographer, Andrea Hallett, sent us this photo yesterday of an adorable little girl wearing a Dear Lillie headband. 

And be sure to check back as our next post will be a 

GIVEAWAY

for some photo editing and a something from our shop! 

I hope you all have a fabulous week!





P.S. And as always, I am behind on e-mails so if you have contacted us with a question we will eventually get back to you, I promise!