More Not Sewing: Crib Skirt Edition

I tried to finish the board and batten today so that I could tell you all about it--I really did. But I couldn't find the caulk. Dave and I both keep hoping the other person will finish the board and batten every time we leave the house. Anyway, given this tragic lack of caulk, I made a crib skirt instead.

We have the Sundvik crib from Ikea:

As you can see, it has solid panels on the ends that come pretty close to the ground, leaving only one non-wall facing side that needs any kind of adornment. And, really, I didn't mind it without one; I kind of like a Spartan crib. But I had the extra fabric from the curtains, so I figured I might as well go ahead and make one.

So I did. Mostly, it was remarkably similar to making no-sew curtains: measure, cut, measure, iron (heat and bond)....until you have a rectangle the right size. For more detailed instructions see one of the 8 million tutorials online or my post about making the matching curtains a little while back.

After all the ironing and not sewing, it looked like that.

Now I had to figure out a way to attach it to the crib. I had made a trip to Hobby Lobby to search for the proper equipment awhile back. I came home with some velcro adhesive tape from Sewology. They had about a million different sizes of this, and they had either self-sticking or sew-on varieties. Unfortunately, all of the adhesive kinds said they weren't good for things like....fabric.

Luckily, I happen to own a $3 tool that will solve all your adhesion related troubles:

 

I was reasonably confident that between the sticky tape on the back of the velcro and a precautionary couple of dots of glue, I'd be covered. It's not like the crib skirt has to move around a lot or anything.

So I attached  strips of the softer part of the velcro to my unsewed rectangle, spacing them every 10 inches (randomly, having guessed wildly at the perfect spacing) along the edge.

 Then I took it upstairs and fed it through the crib and arranged it just above the ground.

After all that careful measuring getting one side of the velcro on, I realized that it didn't really make much difference; the easiest thing was just to match the other side up to the pieces on the fabric and then stick it down on the crib.

See those holes? There's a line of those every so often all along the  crib, so I used them as a guide to line up the fabric, along with frequent checks to see if it looked fairly even along the ground.

And all finished:

You guys are so sneaky; you got yourselves ANOTHER board and batten preview.

I still have enough fabric left to make a pillow cover or something! I really shouldn't be proud of that, since it just means I bought too much fabric.

Oh, I should say that, to be honest, I was not super impressed with the velcro-like tape. I'm a little nervous about the consequences should I want to take the crib skirt down. It only needs to last a few months until we lower the mattress, though, so I may just go with lint rolling and spot cleaning where necessary rather than risk it all falling apart either in the wash or on its way there. Still--I spent something like $2.50 on the velcro tape (it was on sale) and used fabric I already had, so I think the trade-off in durability vs. a real crib skirt was worth it. I don't think I'll have any trouble with it staying put as long as I don't try to mess with it overmuch. I will report back if I discover otherwise!

All Baby, All the Time

I have a big board and batten post to write up as soon as we finally get around to caulking it. This is a busy week, with starting back up with school/work, Dave's tutoring three nights this week, I'm going out with friends, we're hoping to see Les Mis before the baby is born, etc. Also, I'm nervous about caulking. I'm afraid we'll make it look worse instead of better.

Anyway, here is a preview:

Those paper lanterns aren't staying in the crib. Although they make it look kind of festive.

While I still can't quite believe I'm actually going to have a baby very, very soon, I think we're....mostly ready. Look, I even put baby stuff in the new dresser:

Now the baby will be able to wear diapers! The dresser has these little wooden dividers in it, which I find very handy. Even though this drawer is totally stuffed (and I have more diapers that don't even fit), I have bought not a single one for this baby. All stuff I saved plus stuff handed down from friends. Also handy.

Dave and I keep having conversations like this:

Dave: Are we really ready? I feel like we're not ready.
Me: Well, every time I walk past the hospital bag, I shove something else in there.
Dave: I'm not sure that means we're ready.

But we have a car seat and diapers; what else is there, really? Right?

And, finally, I think the what should the baby wear home from the hospital puzzle is solved, depending on how big he is anyway:

My ridiculously talented friend MADE THAT! And gave it to me for the baby! It is very exciting. Here's her facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/shoptoadallyscrumptious

So there you go. Some stuff that's going on.

Nursery Progress Check-in

Eleven days until due date and counting. Counting for I don't know how long, since I don't know when I'll actually have a baby. But anyway. It's getting close, so it seems like a good time to check in on the big master list I made a month ago tomorrow and see how we're doing.

The list:
1. hang curtain room divider: done! read about it here
2. get everything out of there that doesn't belong in there
3. sort through diapers (yay! did it yesterday!)
4. finishing framing and hanging pictures: pictures are framed; we might hang them tonight
5. paint! (paint--Benjamin Moore's Newburg Green--is already purchased)
6. install board and batten: mostly done. We still have to go back through and caulk and touch up paint and stuff. But should be finished tonight or....so. And then I have to blog about it, of course :)
7. refinish the other dresser once it gets here: done! read about it here
8. make a whale: not done. Next weekend?
9. finish washing, sorting, putting away clothes
10. hang light fixture: cancelled. Lamps bought instead.
11. find a lamp or two
12. paint bookshelf: we did even better than just painting!
13. adorable accessories: some. There's one more that I keep waiting to come back into stock at Hobby Lobby. We'll see if that ever happens.
14. make a mobile?: why, yes. read about it here
15. put crib together
16. buy changing pad thing for dresser #2
17. find curtains: find them? We MADE them!

Not bad. Perhaps I need to manufacture deadlines for all our house projects!

More Fun With Cousins

The cousins (along with their parents) are going home to California today, so here's a bit more about the stuff we did while they were here. No more cousins until summer. Boo!

Our kids got this tube thing with Mentos for making diet coke shoot up in the air for Christmas. It was at World Market for something like $7, and I was pretty sure it would be a lot of bang for the buck, excitement-wise. You do not, of course, need to buy the tube contraption at World Market to use mentos and diet coke to create excitement....I guess the point of the tube is that it holds the mentos in place for you until you're ready to drop them all down? Anyway. Much fun was had by all making a diet coke fountain in our front yard.

We tried to get a great picture of all the kids together, but Louis didn't want to be in the picture. So we got these instead:

And then we went to the park. It was cold. And it was the middle of the day, so there are nasty shadows on all my pictures.

One More Nursery Furniture Post: Free Dresser Turned...Not as Free (but Better)

I do not, I'm sorry to say, have any whales or squids to offer you today. But I do have just one more article of furniture to share, and despite its lack of aquatic life, I think the transformation is pretty dramatic.

We already had one dresser for the nursery, but, while it is very pretty, we thought a little more storage would come in handy in a room with no closet, AND we wanted something more changing table height. When I mentioned this to my mom, she told me she had picked up a dresser recently, planning to refinish it and sell it at her shop (A Classy Flea, where you totally need to go if you find yourself in the Atlanta area), but that we could have it instead if we wanted. Thanks, Mom!

We picked it up from her house, and, well....it wasn't the prettiest dresser ever seen. Someone had already done some creative refinishing to it:

Oh my....white, green, AND purple! How....interesting. But it was a nice, solid (Ethan Allen) piece, so I was certain we could make it beautiful. When I was first looking at fabric for what turned out to be our bookcase project , I was thinking I would use it for this dresser somehow. Like maybe covering the drawers with fabric. Only see how they have that fake two drawer where there's really only one thing going on? Yeah....I just couldn't make it work in my head. I was pretty sure it would end up looking sloppy at best. So we opted for embellishing the bookcase with whimsy instead and keeping this dresser a little less exciting. A whale dresser and a squid bookcase is probably plenty of whimsy for one baby.

So we decided on pale blue paint and new brushed nickel hardware. We also opted to put some legs on it while we were at it, partially to make it look nicer, but also because it was a little low for changing table height.

Legs first. We went to Lowes and found these little knobby things to go on the bottom. 

They were about $7 each, so our free dresser was already up to a $28 dresser. Then we picked out hardware. This is where the fake drawer effect really got us, since it nearly doubled the cost of the hardware. We got brushed nickel cup pulls for just under $4 each, and then three knobs for the top drawer for around $2.50 each. So what are we up to? That's another $40, so $68. Then a quart of primer and a quart of paint. I give up; I'm done adding. Under $100, more than $68. We'll use some of the primer and (maybe) the paint for other things, though. 

For paint, we picked Valspar's "Ghost Ship" in a semi-gloss. Ghost ship! Oceans! I pick out the wine with the prettiest label and the paint with the prettiest name.

We came home with our spoils, and Dave set to work getting the legs on.

He's out at the movies, or he could explain this better than I'm about to. But perhaps the picture will fill in the gaps. He screwed these blocks of wood (scrap wood that we already had) into the inside corners of the dresser first, to make a big enough base for the legs to screw into. I forgot to mention that we also bought those metal plates to attach the legs to. They were easy to find because they were right next to the legs in the store. Then he, uhh....screwed the legs in. Yep. See? Okay, I guess how it works is the legs screw into the metal plates first, and then you attach the whole contraption to the dresser, screwing the plates into the wood. 

I was little worried about wobbliness, but it's nice and sturdy. You'd never know the legs weren't always there. 

Finally, he filled in the screw holes on the side with wood putty.

Then he sanded down the whole dresser with the power sander. He was gone forever. When he came back, and I went out to look, most of the awful green and purple paint was all gone. "I told you you just needed to kind of rough it up before we primed it," I said.

"Did you say that?" he asked, "I should really listen to you better."

Oh well. Anyway, we put a coat of primer on it and then the Ghost Ship. We used a little foam roller instead of a brush, and it went on so nicely and brushstroke-freely that I can't believe I've never figured out to paint furniture this way before.  Remember how I wanted a pale blue dresser? Ghost Ship looked pale blue on the card, but on the dresser it looked pretty damn white. Like a ghost, you might say. Once we got it upstairs and in front of the white curtains, it started to look a little gray and maybe a little blue, if you squinted the right way. But it still looks nice. And there's plenty of color in that room already, so maybe it's for the best. 

We debated to polyurethane or not to polyurethane, but the glossy paint looked so....finished when we were done that we opted to forego it. 

Ethan Allen apparently likes to use hardware that is really, really close to a standard size (the pulls we bought were 2 1/2 inches) but not quite. It was close enough, though, that Dave was able to just make the hole on one side just a tiny bit bigger with a drill bit, and the new hardware fit just fine--no wiggling!

It's in front of the room divider curtains now, the last free "wall" in the nursery. I think it will have to move to somewhere where we can attach it to a wall once the baby's moving around on his own, but it's fine for now.

It looks like a totally different piece of furniture!

Hmm...I guess it does look kind of blue? ish?

Sharing with:
Thrifty Decor Chick's January Before and After
Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia
Hookin' Up with House of Hepworths
Chic on a Shoestring Decorating's Flaunt It Friday
Design, Dining, and Diapers Inspiration Gallery Link Party
Miss Mustard Seed's Furniture Feature Friday
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Lovely Crafty Weekend and Lovely Crafty Home
Tater Tots and Jello's Weekend Wrap Up Party
Funky Junk Interiors
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday

Homeschool Wednesday: Georgia Aquarium

We're not really doing school this week. We're still on Christmas break. But my sister-in-law, Amy, her husband, Craig, and their kids, Benjamin and Louis, are in town from California for a few days, so we decided to go to the Georgia Aquarium--the aquarium that was, when it was built, the largest in the world! It doesn't sound so impressive when you have to say it that way. Apparently they just opened a new world's largest aquarium in Singapore in November. I don't think we'll make it to that one any time soon, though.

We live about half an hour away from the aquarium, but we haven't been there for years--not since Gus was very small--so he didn't remember it at all, and the other kids didn't remember it very well. Winter break is not the best time to go. We got there around 11:30, and it wasn't TOO bad then, but within a couple of hours it had gotten crowded enough that it almost wasn't worth being there any more. When we got to the penguins, they had a woman standing outside telling everyone to "enjoy your time, but don't take your time" while watching them. It's awfully expensive to go to the aquarium, and I really feel like I should be able to look at penguins for as long as I want to for that kind of money. So next time I think we'll go when other kids are in school. And when I'm not 38 weeks pregnant.

We touched aquatic animals

Ari pretended to be very excited about this replica of a gray whale jaw bone.

This is a lionfish, and it's really cool looking, but don't be fooled. It's an invasive species AND it causes "excruciating pain" if it stings you.

We saw many pretty fish. There were pops of orange everywhere. It was kind of like the nursery.

You know what's awesome? Jelly fish.

I wanted a nice picture where all my kids were standing in front of fish, looking normal and happy. I did not get one. I'm also not sure why they're all wearing black for their big aquarium trip. I did not select those clothes.

And then we ended the day with the dolphin show. There are dolphins in the dolphin show, and they are awesome because they are dolphins. But then there's also this guy in a light up cape singing songs and a bizarre story line about stars and sea monsters, and Gus was NOT HAPPY about that part. I looked back at him during the show, and he looked disgusted (this picture is from before the show, before all of our dolphin show hopes and dreams were dashed).  "I thought it was going to be about dolphins," he said afterwards, "It was a giant rip off. It was just for that guy to sing songs." I'm with Gus, I have to say. I'd be all for a show where dolphins do flips while their trainers tell you all about how great dolphins are and how they get them to do flips and stuff. Although I'm fine with it if the trainers want to wear light up capes while they talk. Anyway, Gus is considering writing a letter voicing his dissatisfaction.

So kind of a bummer of a way to end the trip, at least for Gus. But all in all, a fun day. With many fish. Also beluga whales. And otters. Otters are the BEST.

Ringing in the New Year With a Fancy Bookcase for the Nursery

(I had sort of hoped to either have a baby before 2012 ended, for tax deduction purposes, or to have the first baby in my city/state/country of 2013, in hopes of getting free stuff. But, as you can see, I am still here. Historically, my babies show up remarkably close to their due dates).

So check out how I'm trying to be a less lazy blogger! I added a gadget with "popular posts" to the sidebar awhile back, but then the problem was it automatically picked the first picture from each post, which was usually some "before" shot of an empty living room or something. I thought that this probably did not make people want to click on the posts. And maybe there is some way to fix it so it won't use the first picture, but I don't know what it is.

So I went through and put better pictures at the top of all the posts that are there right now, BUT I don't want to give away the big reveal in the first picture, because what fun is that? Right? Right?! So, at least for this post, look what I did! I made a visually pleasing picture that merely supplies a tantalizing hint of what is to come. I am so terribly clever.

And, with that unnecessarily long prelude out of the way, I am going to write an unnecessarily long post about the relatively simple project of lining an old bookcase with fabric to make it look prettier.

This bookcase's first role in our family was in Ari's nursery. I'm pretty sure I got it at a garage sale in or around Boston. I don't remember what it looked like to start with, but we painted it white (or repainted it white) back then. Then it moved around our house for years, getting dingier and dingier. This is what it looked like until a couple of weeks ago:

I don't know why I didn't take a picture of the whole thing. I think there was a big trunk in front of it. Anyway, as you can see, not in terrific shape, paint-wise.

So the first order of business was just to get a fresh coat of paint on it, and I decided to go with the same gray, chalk-paintified, that I used on the dresser with the whale pulls: Behr's Burnished Metal from Lowes. Dave put two coats of paint on it and then made his first try at applying finishing wax. This part did not go well. Hint: do not apply finishing wax (especially the first time you try it) at night. Because then maybe you will use too much wax, and then you will think you did a good enough job buffing it, but when you take a look at it later, in daylight, you'll see a whole bunch of nasty yellow wax residue, and it will be way too late to get it off with a rag at that point.

Yes. What happened next was that Dave broke out the power sander and sanded off all the wax and much of the paint. Fortunately there was enough of the gray paint still left on there that one more coat did the trick once the sanding was finished. I repainted it, and then I let Dave do the wax again, because you have to get right back up on that horse, right? And this time he totally nailed it.

We now had a lovely gray bookcase, but we weren't willing to stop there. ANY nursery can have a gray bookcase, but it takes a really special nursery to have a gray bookcase with squids.

Back before Christmas, I discovered Spoonflower while poking around looking for fabulous ocean animal fabric. If you are new to Spoonflower as I was, here, as best as I can gather, is what it's all about: Spoonflower has pretty much any kind of fabric you could possibly want. I guess they have designers who make some of it, or you can design your own fabric and they'll make it for you, and then other people can buy your design, too. It's really cool. And really expensive. The cheapest basic cotton starts at 18.50/yard. It's pretty unapproachable for a bigger project (sorry dining room curtains: no squids for you!), but I only needed a yard for the bookcase, and they had really cool squid fabric, so I splurged a bit and bought it.
The fabric took a long time to get here (2 weeks-ish?), but it looked great when it did.

At first I thought I'd buy some spray starch and attach the fabric to the back of the bookcase that way. But the back was nailed in pretty permanently, so we didn't want to take it off so that we could wrap the fabric around it. And we couldn't just cut the fabric to fit the back or it would fray (plus I was pretty sure measuring it and putting it in there would be fraught with error). In the end, the easiest/safest plan seemed to be cutting a piece of cardboard to fit against the back of the bookcase and covering it with the fabric.

We very carefully measured and remeasured the back of the bookcase and then cut the cardboard (notice our cardboard is a Lowe's box which reads, "Never stop improving." So motivational).

Then we put the cardboard in the back of the shelf to test out the fit, since it would not be easy to make adjustments after the fabric was on there (you'll see in this picture that I changed the order of things to preserve the flow of the story. At this point, shelf had been painted, waxed, and de-waxed with the sander, but the repainting hadn't happened yet).

We laid the fabric out on the cardboard and cut it, leaving anywhere between an inch and a half and three inches or so all around (mostly the three inches was just so we didn't need to cut the top and bottom; it was pretty close, so we left it as it).

For the front side of the fabric backer, we quickly applied spray adhesive (which I already had on hand; apparently spray adhesive holds up much better in a cold/hot garage for years than spray paint does) and then put the fabric down on top, smoothing as we went. We actually sprayed and adhered a small strip at the  bottom first, to hold it in place and keep it even while we did the rest. I used that metal meter stick there to smooth out any wrinkles. There is not much time for all of this. Work quickly!

Try not to fret if it's not perfect; it won't really show when you're finished! Remember my mantra: "I was not really a perfectionist about this part."

Next Dave tied some of the extra fabric around his head and plugged in the hot glue gun. Have I mentioned that this glue gun is the best $3 I've ever spent?

We flipped the cardboard over and put dots of glue all along one side, then wrapped the edge of the fabric around, pulling it tight as we went, and attached it to the back of the cardboard.

I didn't worry overmuch about what the folds looked like in the back, since no one's ever going to see them. I just made sure nothing was poking out past the edges.

Here's what the cardboard looked like, all finished.

We put the cardboard in the bookcase, and it fit like a glove!

And all finished, in its spot between the nursery windows, with the shelves back in!

Now I just have to make myself cover up some of the awesome squiddiness with books and whatnot, because otherwise there is not much point in its being a shelf.

Linking with:
Tuesday's Treasures at My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia
Somewhat Simple
Happy Hour at Design, Dining, and Diapers
Chic on a Shoestring Decorating's Flaunt It Friday
The Shabby Nest's Frugal Friday
Lovely Crafty Weekend at Lovely Crafty Home
Tater Tots and Jello's Weekend Wrap-up Party
Funky Junk Interiors
Classy Clutter's Spotlight Saturday
Under the Table and Dreaming's Sunday Showcase Party
Hookin' Up With House of Hepworths