Adjustable Crib Skirt

As I mentioned before, I wasn't sure how to work with a traditional crib skirt. They look beautiful set up, and I registered for (and received - sorry, gift giver! :) a red one to go with the Mario theme. At the last minute, I bought some red fabric with white dots in case I had time to do this.

http://www.viewalongtheway.com/2012/04/silliest-little-adjustable-crib-skirt-tutorial-on-the-web/

I thought that I could do that, even without a sewing machine. I have a sewing machine, but I thought her version would be easier. Then it didn't happen. Then my mom was here and I showed her the concept. Maybe I just told her the concept. I forget if I showed her the pictures and blog post. Point is, we never got around to making it.

But then I went into labor at 3:30am, tried to deal with it for an hour, and then got super grouchy and mean and left for the hospital at 5am or so. By then, my mother was awake and waiting for a grandkid. At some point (post epidural, when I was a functioning human again) I remember saying "I bet my mom is pacing, vacuuming the stairs since I said I wanted to do that, and making that crib skirt." (I was right on all 3 accounts.)

It came out really well! We have the spring type of foundation in the crib so she used red ribbon type things and then some fabric strips when that ran out. She just tied it to the springs and then when we dropped the crib I adjusted where it was tied. I think it looks nice in both versions. It hides the storage containers that live under the bed!

Higher mattress - before baby was using the room & it still looked all staged and pretty.

Current day lower mattress (Plus boxes of clothes because we're constantly in between sizes and our boxes are organized by size meaning we always have more than one out)

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!)

Home Improvements To The Max

The home improvements around here are like a never ending chain of insanity. The spare bedroom (aka Junk Room for the past 3 years) has been white walls with light gray carpet. I was totally happy leaving it that way because whatever we put on the walls could be our theme. We decided not to register for baby bedding because so many of the pieces are not usable, so whatever goes on the walls is about as far as any theming will go. However, as I began to clean out the room's many MANY boxes, and the carpet came back into view, we re-realized how disgusting the carpet really is in there. The room was a teen boy's room in the last family and at some point he had 3 neon blue walls with one bright orange accent wall. I'm guessing he painted it himself or at least helped, because there is a ton of paint on the floors in those colors. Then they must have painted it white to sell it, but there's a ton of white paint on the floor too. In addition, there's gum or something equally sticky matting down the carpet in several places. Soooooo, we decided that instead of just steaming it as had been our plan, we will just replace it. Now we need to decide and figure out if it's financially adventagous to do our room or stairs at the same time since the carpet guys will be here. That's all happening tomorrow.

So since we knew the yucky carpet was soon to leave the house, Mike decided that maybe we should paint, and if we do we should do it ASAP so it's done before the carpet switch. So that happened yesterday. It's kind of aqua-ish and could totally work for either gender with various decorations. When prepping to paint, I started unscrewing the plates over the light switch and outlets and to my surprise, one of the outlet covers had been painted (with that lovely bright blue and then white) paint directly to the wall and to the plastic outlet pieces. So when I popped it off, it blew the whole upstairs circuit. Luckily I was far enough away that the spark avoided me, but it scared the bejeezus out of me. Mike got it put back on safely and an electrician is coming tomorrow to check that and a few more things that we've been putting off. (Like the fact that when it rains on a windy day, the GFI upstairs flips and the garage door ceases to go up and down. It's awesome!)

SO that's what up these days, in addition to surviving the stomach bug this week, which I hail as my #2 accomplishment during this pregnancy - second only to making it this far! :)