Tag: nursery

Supporting Other Crafters

~ Amanda ~ 4 Comments

As someone who enjoys the artistic energy from creating things, I love to support other crafters, but sometimes it’s hard to find what you are looking for. Most of you know about Etsy, a place to buy handmade artistic wears, and if you don’t, this is a great place to find really neat and unique items. I thought I’d highlight some of our upcoming purchases for the nursery from Etsy.

Closet Dividers

I wish I could take credit for finding these, but my friend G over at Life on the Terrace found them first, and I fell in love! They are dividers for hanging clothes up in the closet, and these are personalized to correspond with baby sizes, but you can customize them to say anything. Super cute! Click on the image to go to PotatoPatch’s Etsy site.

Birth Announcement Print

Since I had good luck finding woodland-themed creatures that matched our theme from PotatoPatch, I took a look at her other wares and found this awesome birth announcement print! Everything is customized, including the clip art, so we’ll pick the owl and the hedgehog to match our stuff. I can’t wait to get this one after Clark is born!

Here’s a picture of all the cliparts she can add to it:

Onesie Stickers

Our last Etsy splurge to add to the nursery actually has very little to do with it. You see, it’s always cute to take a picture on the baby’s monthly birthdays to chart growth, but monthly onesies are expensive, and it’s hard to tell what size baby will actually be in at each month. Enter onesie stickers. You just peel these stickers off and place on a onesie and voila, you have a customized-looking outfit that tells everyone who looks at it exactly how old baby is! No more wondering, “Was that the third month pic or the fourth?” And of course, I found them in woodland creatures again 🙂 Although, she has 20 designs in boy, girl, and gender neutral, and with the great price ($9 for a set of 12!) these make a really unique shower gift if you know someone who is pregnant.

Because I respect individual property rights, I’ve linked all of these images back to the sellers so you can easily find their respective shops. Even though I don’t know these sellers personally, I encourage you to use Etsy to help support artisans from all over the world if you can instead of heading to corporate big-box stores. Plus, this stuff is way cuter, anyway! 🙂

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In Our House: Nursery Progress Part 4

~ Amanda ~ 2 Comments

I finally have fruitful progress to show you! After working all day, Jason and I have managed to clear everything from the closet and room (which was our storage room) with the exception of three light fixtures which will be taken by Jason’s mom at the end of July. We still have some small things left to do in the nursery, but now that it’s all clear, these projects are just minor:

  • Get print made and matted into existing frame. Clean frame and paint.
  • Hang small mirror (seen below on the nightstand).
  • Get a white drum shade for other lamp (same as one pictured on dresser) to put on nightstand.
  • Clean carpets.
  • Get glide rocker and ottoman set up (Mom won’t let me have it until the shower 😛 ).
  • Trim and hem curtains (the green ones are too long and neither set have been hemmed on the sides where they were cut in half).
  • Get everything we receive at the shower on August 1st set up and ready to go.
  • Fill the basket on the nightstand with books 🙂

And because it’s boring without them, here are some pictures:

This is the main dresser for his clothes, and it will also serve as a changing table once we get a changing pad set up. To the left is our stash of extra diapers, which will move into the closet now that we have the room and will be replaced by the diaper pail. Cut off on the right is his adorable hamper with all the woodland creatures on it. The lamp you see on the dresser has a mate for the nightstand (see below) but the shade is missing so we’ll have to get another shade before adding it to the room. The print will go above the right side of the dresser.

Here’s a pic of the finished bulletin board and rough window treatments. The door you see is the open closet door (which will eventually be replace with a white six panel hollow core door).

Here’s the other side of the window along with our leaf pod. Our glide rocker and ottoman will go here.

Here’s the lonely corner without the glide rocker. On the nightstand (which will hold my breastfeeding supplies in the beginning) is a basket for some books, an ultrasound picture, and the mirror that will hang above.

This picture of the closet doesn’t do it justice because it is easily double the size in the picture – probably 6 foot wide by 4 foot deep. We are easily able to store the stroller, car seat and base, and several totes in it along with clothing and linens, and we will also be able to fit a pack and play and lots of toys when we start to collect those items.

Hope you enjoyed some updated pics of the nursery! But that’s not all we’ve been working on today. We got rid of so much junk/clutter from the nursery and the office. We’re still working on paring down all the stuff in the office, but because we don’t have any extra closets/a basement/a waterproof shed to store extra things, it’s kind of our catch-all for the time being.

Reader Weigh-In: Art for Clark?

~ Amanda ~ 6 Comments

Obviously, my number one project right now is finding all the perfect pieces for Clark’s future home, and I’ve been trying to find some art to work. My question is this: Would the print below (one of my recent photography pieces) look good for a nursery? I was thinking in a dark wood frame, either with or without a white matte? What do you think?

Nursery Progress Part 3: Update

~ Amanda ~ 6 Comments

Just stopping in to give some update pictures from the projects I mentioned in the last post. Enjoy!

And here is a highly requested belly shot, from exactly 19 weeks. Needless to say, I’ve more than popped. Oh, and this is with -2 pounds gained!

Nursery Progress Part 3

~ Amanda ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday was a busy day for nursery projects as two days ago we found out that we are having a BOY! I’ve had a couple of projects in mind for the nursery depending on the baby’s sex, and I’m glad to start personalizing everything for little Clark Allen!

Project #1 is something that I’ve thought about for a long time, and that’s the giant name letters for the room. I’ve always wanted to have our baby’s name in big letters over the crib, as a statement to the world of who it would be. I started out at Michael’s, but their letters were kind of cartoony and girly for the big 12 inch height. Then I went to Hobby Lobby and found the perfect, traditional letters that make Clark’s traditional name stand out.

But what color to paint them? At first, I thought about white. Eh, too girly with all our dark wood and warm caramel walls. Then, green popped in, but we’ve been adding so much green that I didn’t want to overload the room. So I decided on a nice baby blue, which will pop against the wall color and will compliment our other nursery pieces such as the hamper, diaper hanger, and bumper pad.

Here they are drying on the back side of my craft mat (sewers, don’t worry, the other side is still perfectly fine and is the side I use to cut patterns!). With my leftover blue paint, I decided to take an old corkboard and make a scenic update to it to help balance the color in the room and to use up some little trees I had found on clearance months before at Michael’s. I got this idea because Jason had painted this very corkboard for my dorm room in college, when I was in to hot pink and palm trees 🙂

I painted it blue, then dug out my other set of craft paints and added some hills and clouds. I have six trees and four woodland animal cutouts that I bought already painted that I will mount this week on the outside edges of the board (trees on the bottom, animals on the sides) when I have a chance to grab my glue gun from my classroom. But isn’t everything so cute already???

Total cost for both projects: $7 for the letters (unfinished wood is 30% off at Hobby Lobby this week) and $2 for 2 bottles of blue paint. I had already purchased everything else or had it at home. Oh, and the little wood cut outs were around $0.50 a piece when I bought them a few months ago. I’m so excited to get these up in the nursery this week to show the finished product!
So what are the rest of our nursery plans? Well, here’s a drawing of the final layout:

Yes, I know, crappy Paint drawing. We are going to:

  • mount the letters above the crib.
  • pick out 5 pictures (one of each of our parents, one of each of us as a child, one of us) and find frames to mount above the dresser in a collage pattern.
  • mount the cork board above the chest of drawers
  • find a small end table to go next to where the glide rocker and a small lamp, ideally one with a door on it so we can hide away things I’ll need for breast feeding
  • buy a small 2 or 3 shelf espresso colored book case to go on the wall next to the glide rocker and some blue and green baskets to go on the bottom shelf for Clark’s toys. The top shelf will be used for books to read to him with.
  • buy the outer curtains from Target (it’s actually a cloth shower curtain that I’m going to cut in half and hem – hey, you can’t fix perfect!) and it looks like this:

Any suggestions for anything else in our nursery? Once we have our yard sale next week and get back some of the space we’ve been using in there to store those items, I’ll take full-on nursery pics so you can see the whole thing.