Fresh Green Apple Wreath

Thank you all so much for your prayers! Our Uncle Bob, was able to return home from the hospital today after getting a pacemaker put in yesterday, and I got the okay to be up and about again - yay! Thank you all for your sweet notes of encouragement. I am going to be extra careful from here on out and have to cut back on some things (mainly we won't be offering as many new items in our Etsy shop as I had planned on this spring, but hopefully will be able to by this fall!) I need to keep my little munchkin cooking for as long as possible and don't need any more scares like these past two weeks! We will be reopening our shop on Friday with all of our current items and hopefully will be slowly offering a few more new things over the next few weeks but definitely not as many as originally planned. 


Also, I wanted to say thank you to René over at Cottage and Vine for featuring Dana's apartment that we did a post on back in August. You should check out her fabulous blog that is full of decorating ideas on a budget! I especially have enjoyed her recent drop-cloth posts. There are a few ideas I really want to try!


We finally got all of our Christmas decorations down and everything put away. I always have such mixed feelings when we take down all of the Christmas stuff. At first is seems so depressing and our house starts to look so barren and cold. Then once everything is put away I always get a huge urge to clean (and it was even worse this year thanks to my already being in major nesting mode - haha). Because I am not supposed to be doing a whole lot still, Jon did most of the scrubbing and heavy-duty cleaning and I got to work on cleaning out drawers and organizing. Once the cleaning is done I always get excited again and don't miss the Christmas decorations at all. It feel so good to have everything organized and have a fresh clean slate to start playing around with. I always struggle the most with decorating this time of year, though, because by January I am starting to get sick of the darker, warmer colors that I start using in September, but it is too early to do anything too spring-like. I generally end up sticking with the same green and white palette I use for Christmas but try to lighten and brighten it up a bit more.


Today I worked on a few projects. First Lillie and I added some fresh green apples to a wreath. She thought poking holes in the apples was great fun! Several years ago I covered a grapevine wreath left over from our wedding with a mix of greenery from Hobby Lobby and every year after Christmas I pull it out and add either fresh granny smith apples or pears to it. I think it looks better when I do a full circle of apples (filling in the gaps between the apples with more apples) but that makes the wreath sooooo heavy. When I use it for our front door I do that because I think it looks prettier and our wreath hanger can handle the weight, but indoors on this mirror I was afraid it would be too heavy. 


The apples generally last around 2 to 3 weeks depending on the weather and then I normally replace them once or twice and then after that it is on to a new project and I put this away or use it somewhere else until the following January. Obviously I could use faux apples and glue them on the wreath but I like using fresh, natural items as much as possible!












We removed the Silent Night and The First Noel prints from the frames and put back in photos of Miss Lillabel. I kept the burlap pillows and stack of books with the boxwood as is for now because they still work with the green of the wreath. Then I switched out the little rosemary tree (which had died while we were away) for some oversized twine balls. 









I took down all of the greenery, lights and stockings from the mantel but left the paperwhites. I have a few projects planned for sprucing the mantel back up - it looks so bare and boring now! 







 I also have some projects planned for this little corner of the living room too that I hope to get to in the next week or so.



Although I have always enjoyed making cards and candy and little things like that I have never done any decorating for Valentine's Day before. This year though I have a few projects I am planning on doing starting with a few pillows. I have four that I am working on. I got two of them finished today and they are sitting on our sofa.  The other two I am still working on. Here is the script from one of the finished ones. Hopefully I will have time to photograph them tomorrow in natural light. I didn't finish them until tonight so there wasn't any point in trying to take any photos. 


Well, I hope you all are having a wonderful week! If I have time tomorrow I will post some pictures of the pillows!

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Fresh Green Apple Wreath

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https://day-lab-diy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fresh-green-apple-wreath.html

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Happy Thanksgiving, Some Christmas Decorating and the Winner of Our Holiday Fairyland Thermal

Enter His gates with THANKSGIVING and His courts with praise; give thanks to Him and praise His name. For the LORD is good and His love endures forever; His faithfulness continues through all generations.
Psalm 100 : 4-5


I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We had such a nice day here in Williamsburg. The team had practice this morning and then everyone went over to Coach and Mrs. Shaver's for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. The food was absolutely divine! I have no idea how Mrs. Shaver was able to have that much food and have it all cooked to perfection and piping hot (imagine feeding a team full of 6'8 growing boys who can eat more in one sitting than most of us can in two weeks...seriously, if you could see what they can eat at one time you would be in shock. I have been watching it for five years now and still can't fathom how it is humanly possible to eat as much as they do and not be violently ill). Lillie is definitely going to grow up thinking Thanksgiving is a basketball holiday and not a family holiday - haha! She had lots of fun playing trains, ping pong, foosball and being doted on. In fact when it was time to leave she pretended to fall asleep in one of their chairs so that she could extend her stay a little longer =). We definitely miss our families and getting to spend the holiday with them but thanks to phones and skyping it's not too bad and we did have a truly wonderful Thanksgiving.


Now it's time to get back to work! Our Etsy shop is back open and along with that we are continuing to get ready for Christmas and Lillie's birthday. Seeing how it is now officially Christmas season I thought I would start posting some pictures of our Christmas decorating. This room is actually my favorite this year but is the worst to photograph. We only have windows on one wall and there is a covered porch outside of those windows so we don't have much natural light which can make taking pictures a major pain. Everything looks kind of fuzzy and yellowish.  Anyway, here is our family room:



We kept it simple in here and just used fresh greenery and some fresh rosemary plants.





Here is one of the stockings that Lillie helped make.



When I first hung the wreath above the couch I just used one sticky hook and that night it came crashing down on Jon! I thought it was quite funny but he did not find it so humorous! Now there are two hooks holding it up and I promised him if it fell again I would put it somewhere else!




I always put greenery around our TV too which Jon really hates because he thinks it interferes with the remote working properly.


I am missing one of the pictures of this little corner between the family room and kitchen. If I can find it I will add it tomorrow.






Several of the projects Lillie and I have been working on are over here: the stocking, some Christmas song prints, the burlap pillows and the tea-stained pile of books.






I saw this project on two of my favorite blogs, My Sweet Savannah and Miss Mustard Seed earlier this fall and finally tried it! It seriously was the easiest thing and I am so excited about it I am going to make three more piles of them for some other spots around the house! You just rip off the covers of some ordinary books - I just used some I had that were stuffed in the armoire out on our porch catching dust, and then I rubbed some tea on the front and back pages and then watered down some brown paint and rubbed it on the spines. After that I just used some twine and bundled them and stuck some fresh greenery on it and that was it!



We normally have photos of Lillabel in these frames above the wingback chairs but I decided to just quickly type up two of my favorite Christmas songs and put them in the frames.



If you want to use either of them just click on them and they should open larger in another window for you to print. I would recommend printing them on cardstock. I am not sure how crisply they will print, though, because they are JPG's. I am going to list the PDF files in our Etsy shop for 99 cents. I am not sure how to upload a PDF to our blog.






I am not quite happy yet with our dining room but here is what we have for now. I like the sideboard area but don't like how the table looks but haven't had time to play around with it without my little "helper" Lillie.

















And here is a dark shot of our living room. I am waiting to take the rest of those pictures until we get our tree up. Oddly enough, as much as I LOVE decorating for Christmas I HATE doing the tree for some reason.



Another odd thing is that as much as I like taking pictures I find it soooo awkward taking pictures in front of anyone besides my family. I brought my camera to the Shaver's this afternoon but only snapped a few shots before I felt weird and put my camera away. Here is Lillie playing before all of her "friends" arrived.


And here she was pushing it back and forth to Andrew and Kyle while they were trying to eat. I think they were probably very quickly wishing they could switch seats with someone - haha! Actually, they (along with all of the boys) are incredibly good with Lillie. It is so sweet watching them. They are all such good kids!






Okay and now for the winner of our Holiday Fairyland Thermal:
Congratulations to Kara of Kara's Korner!


(I did use Random.org, as always, to draw our winner but my computer is refusing to do a screen save/print screen right now! Arghh! Also a quick reminder to everyone who enters our contests - please make sure that we can contact you! The first winner that we drew had a blocked profile so we had no way to get in touch with them so we had to draw again!)


Don't forget to enter our discount code BLOG15 to get 15% off your order if you shop at Dear Lillie this weekend!


I will post either tomorrow or Saturday with our upstairs decorations. The lighting is a little better up there so those ones came out a little bit sharper.


I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving!

Post Title

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Happy Thanksgiving, Some Christmas Decorating and the Winner of Our Holiday Fairyland Thermal

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https://day-lab-diy.blogspot.com/2010/11/happy-thanksgiving-some-christmas.html

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