Nursery

A twitter post reminded me today that I never documented everything we did for our DIY nursery. Many moons ago I showed my husband a few Mario nursery pictures online and he decided from that moment that we were going to have that theme. He didn't care if we had a girl or a boy, that's what he wanted. (I was not willing to do it for a girl, and since I really didn't want to find out what we were having it almost didn't happen.) Since he talked me into finding out, and we knew a boy was in our future, I decided why not.

We couldn't afford to do the Think Geek decals and we're not artistic enough to draw a whole world scene on the walls like some people, so we had to decide how to approach it.

My googling led me to a variety of crafts including cross stitch patterns and quilts. I technically can cross stitch, but it takes me forever and I'm not very good. My mom is better and is retired, so I asked her to make that for a Christmas present. 

I figured we could do something red with white polka dots to have the style of the Mario mushroom. Originally I was going to have just a red crib skirt, but I noticed in lots of pictures and people confirmed that once you drop the mattress, the crib skirt pools on the floor so I once again farmed out a job to my mom using this pattern. It ties on the mattress frame and we can adjust it so that when we drop the mattress it will still be straight and not dragging.

A friend painted a picture for us as a surprise, which was great because it gave us something big. We spent time at Lowes looking for the right "Mario Sky Blue" paint which wound up being "Beach Sparkle." Luckily I didn't have to paint - hubby and FIL did that!

While I'm sure the cross stitch picture took the most time in general, the pictures over the changing table took me the most time. I used quilt patterns I found as inspiration. I was going to make them 1" squares of paper originally, and glue them to a set of art canvas from the store. But to fit the canvas, I had to make them .75" squares. I didn't trust my ability to cut THAT MANY squares perfectly, so I used Excel to change it up a little. Instead of doing all squares, I made strips where I could. (I used cell merge on Excel so I could see what I was doing.) 

Original patterns in excel using only squares:

Turned into strips:

First, I used leftover wall paint on the canvases so that any place that didn't have a picture would just blend in with the wall. I taped the strips/squares to a piece of scrapbook paper and then used modpodge to get it all together. At first it was horribly bubbly and I was sad that I had wasted all that time for it to come out lousy. But luckily as it dried it got better. It's not as good as I wish it was, but it is ok. I learned that Stampin Up cardstock's weight is much better than average stuff. The white and black cheapy paper I used caused most of the problems.

We found a stuffed coin box at Best Buy, a friend sent a stuffed mushroom, and my mom covered a small lamp and pillow with the same fabric as the bed skirt. For the curtains and shelves we used red to keep the mushroom color going. Finally, we splurged and bought the Nintendo font letters from someone on Etsy. (No longer available)

The final product! (It makes me laugh to look at these pictures from right around when he was born, because nothing is that organized now!)