The craftiness continues!

On Friday night, I was feeling particularly baby-minded (probably because of an evening on the town with some friends are their freakishly adorable 8-month-old daughter and the fact that other friends had given birth to their first baby early that morning), so I persuaded Joel to take me to Jo-Ann to get some baby yarn. There is a surprisingly large selection of yarns for baby projects, ranging from soft to fuzzy to sparkly to furry, as well as plenty of color options.

I ended up choosing Bernat Softee Baby yarn in #31415 Candy Baby Ombré (available here), which is a nice soft, lightweight yarn in gradated light, but bright pink, blue, and yellow.

When we got home, Joel got busy with wiring up the house for our new camera system (which will allow him to log in from work to see our little one playing at home if he so desires), and I started searching online for free crochet patterns for baby hats. I came across Crochet Pattern Central, which (while sadly 1995-ish in its layout, usability, and searchability) was a great source for blogs dedicated to crocheting. I clicked around in there for a while until I came across Alli Crafts and her pattern for a newborn-sized baby hat with earflaps. Perfect! I didn’t know all of the stitches that I needed for the pattern, but YouTube is a great source for tutorials. So, I bravely set out to make the hat.

It took me a few tries to get the hang of the “magic ring,” but I finally figured it out! I finished it up on Saturday morning, while Joel cut holes in our walls and drilled things and pulled wires (I know; he’s a handy guy). I modified the pattern a bit when it came time to do the string ties. Instead of a normal braid, I used a rope braid, which looks a little cuter and came out much more uniformly than my attempts at using a regular braid.

I added the flower embellishment as the pattern directed and decided the hat needed a few more. I ended up with three flowers, each a different size. So cute (if I’m allowed to compliment my own work)! I can hardly wait to see Evie in this hat! Only twenty days until my due date!

My work here is done!

Well, not really… It’s barely even started; I realize that! But it is nice to have the nursery feel like it’s all put together. I spent a few hours in the nursery last week, organizing and rearranging. It was nice to have drawers to put things into and hangers for all the cute little outfits that people got us at our shower last month.

The furniture was one of the last pieces to get situated in the room. We purchased a dresser that will also function as a changing table and a crib on “black Friday” when there was a good sale at Babies R Us, so we were working around giant boxes for most of the early part of the process. My parents bought us one of those glider rocking chairs and the crib mattress for the room too that same weekend (hooray for good sales!). Two weeks ago, we finally buckled down and put everything together!

Here’s the dresser we picked out, which, thankfully, came fully assembled:

And the matching crib:

Joel was also a hero for spending what seemed like FOREVER installing the most complicated ceiling fan in the world. He’s super handy, so the fact that this took him more than 5 minutes is a testament to how annoyingly difficult the manufacturer made it to put together. It looks great, and works perfectly. Thanks, Joel!

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, I have been doing a bit of sewing for the room including crib sheets, a dust ruffle, and a pillow… It all started out just looking like an intimidating pile of fabric and sewing supplies.

It was easier than I thought it would be to put together each of the items I made; I followed some great online patterns for the sheets, dust ruffle, and pillow for the glider.

Here’s the crib with the finished dust ruffle:

And then with the mattress (thanks, Mom & Dad!) and sheet:

The glider chair (again, thanks, Mom & Dad!) with the newly finished box-pleat pillow and a teddy bear from a friend:

I modified the pillow pattern to fit the size I wanted for the chair, which made it slightly more complicated than it would have been, but that’s just me—slightly more complicated than you’d expect.

You can also see the new rug in those pictures… Made in the USA from natural fibers along with a completely natural and eco-friendly rug pad underneath. No unnecessary toxins in this baby’s room! (If you are thinking that I sound a bit like a hippie, pass me a tie-dyed peasant skirt, and I’ll be on my way.)

Looking forward to our second and third baby showers this weekend! It is so much fun to celebrate this baby girl with my friends and family!

My little Evangeline, your room is almost ready! Now it’s up to you to keep growing big (but not too big, please…) and strong! I’m looking forward to meeting you in about 2 and a half months!

EDIT: Added a few more pics that I’d forgotten about…

As you may recall, our nursery decor is based on the Alexander Henry fabric pattern “Starling,” which looks like this:

I used the birds in this fabric as the pattern for the mobile I made for over the crib, and it was also the basis for the mural I designed. As I did with the mobile, I first created the design for the mural in Adobe Illustrator so I could mock it up within the space available in the room. I had originally intended to cover an entire wall, but I am very glad now that I scaled back a bit. “Regular Laure” could have handled the whole wall; “pregnant Laure” gets tired a lot faster. Shocking, I know.

I used my trusty projector to beam the design up onto the wall and traced it in pencil so I would have guidelines to help me as I painted. I probably could have free-handed it, but I find that the projector method is faster and makes for cleaner lines. As a graphic designer, I often find that the perfection you can easily accomplish with a computer program is much more difficult on paper with a brush, pen, or pencil. The projector gets me a bit closer to what I’m used to expecting.

I first tackled the largest piece, the black branch.

Then I added in the main colors for each of the birds.

Finally, I completed the birds with all their unique markings and colors and painted in the complicated and detailed flowers. I ended up simplifying a few of the birds’ markings and colors to make them bolder and easier to paint.

Overall, I am very pleased with how it looks. Depending on how energetic I feel in the next month or so, I may add a few more starts and a flower or two to other parts of the room to pull it all together.

Next up: Crib Skirt & Furniture

While I have been spending much of my free time with crafty things for the nursery, Joel has been filling his time too! The nursery had to be repainted since converting it from a dressing room/giant closet into a suitable and livable space meant a LOT of spackling. Joel did an amazing job with all the layers of spackle and rounds of sanding. I did what I could to be helpful, but most of the job required climbing up a ladder, a task completely possible but not recommended for those in the “with child” category.

After the spackling was dry, Joel started on painting the ceiling. The white we used was left over from when I painted the dining room last year, so this was the only gallon that wasn’t the eco- and pregnancy -friendly “No VOC” paint. I stayed out of the room until the ceiling was dry and the air was clear just to be safe.

For the walls, we selected Olympic paints from Lowe’s because they contain no VOCs (volatile organic compounds), which are bad. If you need to know more than “bad,” go to Olympic’s site to read all about the gory details.

The colors we selected were actually from Sherwin-Williams, but their zero VOC paint was a lot more expensive (and their logo scares me with all that blood covering the earth).

We took the SWP paint swatches to Lowe’s, where they easily matched the colors and mixed up our paint. Joel and I decided to paint three side of the room a light yellowy off-white color called “Eaglet Beige,” and the fourth wall a darker color, a warm caramel latte color called “Tamarind.”

With the mobile and crib sheets complete and the wall paint dry, it was time for my next project—the wall mural… which I’ll put into my next post. Can you handle the anticipation?

Joel and I have finally started the real work on putting the nursery together. We’ve had some of the pieces, namely the furniture, lying around in boxes for a few weeks, but no progress had really been made on actually converting the room from a giant closet/dressing room.

Once we selected our paint colors and Joel began the smelly and somewhat toxic task of painting the walls, I found myself with a few minutes to begin some of my nursery-related tasks.

Since we are not going to be using traditional crib bumpers (cute, but expensive and possibly a suffocation hazard), we decided against picking out a set of bedding for the room. Instead, we selected a fabric so I can make any of the items I decide that we need. After a lot of searching, I discovered Alexander Henry’s 2005 Fashionista line, which includes the Starling pattern. It comes in three color sets (blue, pink, and natural). We decided to go with the “natural” color set because of the bright, cheery colors.

The current plan is to make the following items for the nursery:

• 4 Crib Sheets
• Mobile for over the crib
• Dust ruffle
• Pillow(s) for glider chair

I also have vague plans for a small hand-painted mural on one wall, but we’ll see how energetic I am as time moves forward.

For starters, I found a simple pattern online for a crib sheet and put the first of 4 together in about 60 minutes. I figured out a few tricks and shortcuts in the process, so I’m thinking that the other three should be a bit faster.

Once the first sheet was done, I shifted my focus to the mobile. I purchased sheets of felt in all different colors to match the fabric and used a scan of the design to create some simple patterns in Adobe Illustrator.

I printed out the patterns and got to work cutting the pieces out of the felt. Boy, was that a task! I though my fingers were going to fall off from using the tiny scissors! I eventually simplified a few of the designs when I realized the felt and/or my scissors weren’t cooperating for the very small or thin pieces.

I sewed the felt starlings together with a simple whip stitch in contrasting thread to play up the “hand made” look and used my trusty hot glue gun to affix the rest of design pieces. I hadn’t originally cut out eyes for the birds, but eventually decided to test out my mini hole punch on the black felt. It worked perfectly! I attached the eyes with hot glue as well.

When the six birds were finished, I turned my attention to putting together the frame for the mobile. I had purchased some black ribbon (which matches the black ribbon-like swirls in the fabric) and some wreaths made of twisted branches, which I tied together and hung from a hook on my kitchen ceiling. After the mobile was hung, all naked and birdless, I started to get really excited. It was all coming together!

I strung the birds onto the ribbons using a yarn needle and tied knots at the bottom to keep them from shifting. I started wondering if the ceiling fan would provide enough wind to make the mobile move, but when it came time to take some pics and the thing wouldn’t stop spinning, I knew it would work out just fine!

Now I just need the nursery painting to be finished so we can put the furniture together and see how it is all starting to come together!