Merry Christmas!

Here's our Christmas card this year.

We hope you have a wonderful holiday!

Holiday Updates

Yes, I realize I've been really slacking about blogging recently. Things have been a whirlwind with work and the holidays, there's just not been a lot of time! However, my lack of activity on here does not reflect what's actually going on, we've actually been doing quite a bit of work.

In our bedroom, we are slowly but surely making changes and I'm loving it! A few weeks ago, I got the jewelry armoire that I'd been considering on sale in a Cyber Monday sale. I got the Oxford Jewelry Armoire from HomeDecorators in white. I had been planning to buy this jewelry armoire from Ballard Designs, but at the last minute I decided that the French white was too yellow for my liking. I am really happy with the armoire, now I have lots of storage for both fashion and nice jewelry.

We also ordered a new bed for our room and it came in this week!  I had originally planned to DIY a headboard, similar to my upholstered ottoman... but, after much thought, I decided that we wanted the upholstered side rails as well. I kept trying to figure out what kind of bed skirt we would do with a headboard with our bedding, and finally decided that ordering the bed was the best way to achieve the look I wanted. We got the Montmartre bed from Joss and Main. I wasn't sure how the process would be, it was my first time ordering from them, but it was awesome. The bed even came in earlier than expected! So far we are loving it, and it makes a big difference in our room... another check for slowly phasing out our old furniture!

Other than those things, we are prepping for Christmas around the house. Our tree went up the weekend after Thanksgiving, although the rest of our decorations took a while to get completed.

Lastly, I am super excited because our annual Christmas party is this Saturday! We love hosting our friends for this party each year, it's going to be so much fun! I have a lot of shopping and cooking to do before then, but I know it will be wonderful. And, as if reuniting with old friends and celebrating the holidays wasn't enough, I'm sure the festive cocktails that I've prepared will get everyone in the right mood!

Hope you have a great last weekend (!!) before Christmas. Have you finished your shopping?

Thanksgiving Recap

Yes, I know, it's already been a week since Thanksgiving! It's crazy how fast time flies, Christmas will be here before you know it!

We hosted Thanksgiving for our families at our house this year. We had a wonderful time on Thursday, here are some pictures from the day.

Amazing Salted Caramel Pecan Pie Recipe Here

On Friday, I hosted a Friendsgiving girls' night with friends. We all brought dishes and it was a ton of fun. I set the table slightly differently for this event since it was smaller.

On Saturday I went to the last NCSU football game of the season. Even though we lost, it was fun to see Sarah and hang out with my family. Then, Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent, and I love this time of the year with all of the decorations at church. Later that afternoon, we took our Christmas card photo and went to get our Christmas tree!

Have you ordered your Christmas cards yet?!

It's that time of the year!! I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends... we sure did! I'll be back later to talk about our long holiday weekend.

This year, there is even less time than usual between Thanksgiving and Christmas... so I hope you've either ordered or are ordering your cards very soon! I ordered our Christmas cards from TinyPrints last night, like I've done in the past. But this year, they have some awesome new designs, new trim options, and even include foil printing on some designs!!

Plus, you can get 30% off your entire order at TinyPrints with code CB13 until Dec. 3rd!

Here are some of my favorites:


They even have cute cards to show off your pets!

DIY Custom French Pleat Curtains

When we chose the dark blue paint color (Benjamin Moore Evening Dove) for our master bedroom a few months ago, we decided that we would hang white curtains from floor to ceiling to make the room feel lighter. The room has a vaulted ceiling, but I loved the high contrast look of the tall white curtains in other rooms. 

Shopping for curtain panels can be a pain... you need to find the correct length, material, and sometimes you get stuck between options like tap-top or grommets... which can be right for certain rooms and situations, but wasn't what I was looking for. I decided that I wanted either back-tab curtains or French pleat (pinch pleat).  Panels like these vary widely in cost, but a lot of times you will spend a lot of extra money just to get the pleat look. Well, here's a great and surprisingly cheap option for you to make your own French Pleat curtains using Ikea Ritva curtain panels. 

A pair of Ikea Ritva panels comes in either 98" or 117" lengths, so you get a lot of fabric for the low cost (you can always hem them to be shorter, if needed). I bought the 98" length and I'm really happy with how they look. Here's how I created the French Pleats.

 You will need to buy the panels from IKEA and then buy triple pleat hooks (like these) from somewhere like JoAnn Fabric or on Amazon. IKEA does sell some pleat hooks, but they are double pleat hooks and won't give you the same effect. If you want the triple pleat, you will need to buy the 4-pronged pins.

The nice thing about using the Ritva curtain panels, is that they have built in pleater tape into the header of the curtain. (If you are doing this with another kind of panel, you will need to sew this pleater tape into the top section of the curtain yourself) This means that you can create almost any design of pleats that you want... you just need to figure out where to put your hooks.

To start, put one of the prongs into a slot in the header.  Then, depending on how deep you want the pleats, place the second prong into another slot. Continue this until you have your finished single pleat.  Before you start your panel, you will want to decide how big you want each pleat to be and how much space you want to leave in between pleats. For my curtains, I had 5 pleats (each created out of 8" of panel width) leaving about 3" between each. On the ends, you can put a single pin in a slot to keep the panel ends neatly attached to the rod.

 When you are done, it looks like this:

Then, you just need to either attach the hooks to rings and hang them, or use the rings directly on your rod.

There you go! I'm pretty excited about the way they turned out. I still need to do a lot more in this room, but having curtains up already makes it feel so much nicer!