Nesting: Made the Baby Bumper

While working/sewing my way towards having the baby's room finally complete, I was down to only needing to recover the crib bumper and crib skirt. For some reason I am not looking forward to making the crib skirt and decided to go with the bumper. Like my quilt I posted previously, I wanted to cover the bumper with elephants, but instead of doing it with a gray fabric and white elephants, I decided on doing it with a white fabric and gray elephants. I wanted to keep it not matching 100% even though the colors were the same. I also decided to not make the whole bumper with white fabric but to make one whole side with the leftover gray fabric I used in the quilt to tie it together.

So after a couple days of brainstorming, I got to work. I started with taking the crib bumper I had and attacking it with a seam ripper down the longest side. Once I was able to get the whole bumper cover off, I used it as a guide for how big to cut the fabric for the new bumper. Once all of my pieces were cut out (which consisted of 6 rectangular cuts of each fabric) I got to work stamping on the elephants as I did with the quilt.

I took a gray acrylic paint, smeared it all over a plate, then took my elephant cookie cutter, dipped it into the paint, and stamped it onto my white fabric horizontally (or longways).

I ended up adding some variety to my stamping by turning my cookie cutter over and making one line of the elephants go in the opposite direction. Once all of that had dried, I took some blue ric-rac (because Walmart didn't want to carry blue pipping I got creative) and sewed it along one short edge of the bumper piece and then down the longest side of the bumper (only on the right side of the white fabric). I was able to do this by lining up the edge of the ric-rac with the edge of the fabric and then sewing a 1/4 inch seem (which went straight down the middle of the ric-rac).

Once all the ric-rac was sewn onto the white side of the bumper (except for the bottom longest side), I sandwiched the white fabric with the gray fabric right sides together so that the ric-rac was in between.

I then sewed the bumper together, keeping one of the small ends open for stuffing and turned the fabric inside out and ironed it to make sure it was the right size for the stuffing I saved. This is what the ric-rac looks like when you use it as piping.

After I had ironed the fabric, I turned it back inside out and did one last check to make sure the fluff would fit.

I turned the bumper right side out and stuffed the fluff into the bumper pinning it along the way so I could get a good fit.

Once I had it pinned, all I had left to do was to sew up the open end and add some ribbon straps with velcro on the ends to attach the bumper securely to the crib. If you are making your own you need to make sure that the bumper is pulled tightly around the side of the crib so you don't run the risk of suffocating your baby.

Below is a picture of the quilt, bumper, and mobile that I redid. When put all together it looks so darn cute! Now I just have to wait for little baby Liam to arrive so he can enjoy it too :)

♥ Mrs. Suzie

Recovering a Lamp with Hemp Cord

So I was given some nursery items (Dust ruffle, mobile, quilt, etc.) that came with a matching lamp from one of my cousins. The lamp was covered in nautical animals which was cute but wasn't the direction I was going for Baby Liam's nursery. So then took the nautical animals off the lamp and did some creative thinking with some hemp cord I had laying around.

I started hot glueing the hemp cord to the base of the lamp and wrapped and glued and wrapped and glued.

Once I wrapped all the way to the top, I wrapped it one more time to build up a layer of hemp cord to be level with the surface of the top of the lamp.

Then I continued wrapping and glueing the hemp cord around the top of the lamp. I tried keep all sides even while glueing around the lamp.

Once I got close to the end I cut the hemp cord from the ball and glued the tail down before glueing down the rest of the hemp cord around the lamp post.

And VOILA! Beautiful, rustic lamp! This will go so nicely with my mobile I made last week. Stay tuned for pictures of it along with my bumper once I get it re-covered.

♥ Mrs. Suzie

Let the Nesting Begin!

Today I am currently 29 weeks pregnant and with the joy of knowing that Little Liam will be here in a little over 10 weeks so does the anxiety of knowing I have no where to put him. We are currently working on a house that will be our "forever" home and I'm starting to worry that it won't be finished in time (to see our progress go to my other blog here). So I decided to turn our current guest room (in the rental we are staying in) into a makeshift nursery.

My mother-in-law suggested that I leave the guest bed in the room so if I decided I wanted to still use it as a guest room (for grandmas coming to help out) I could. So as you can see below my guest bedroom is not very organized. With people giving me stuff and the recent baby shower, I have turned my guest bed into a throw pile.

Along with that throw pile, I have two dressers crammed into the corner. One (the smaller one) full of newborn to 3 month baby clothes. My bassinet (which you can't really see to the left) didn't really need to be in there so I moved it to my master bedroom.

As you can see this bedroom has become a catch-all room for random things like my husbands road bike.

After some strenuous use of muscle, I was able to move the guest bed into the far corner to give me more floor space and I finally put some linens on it to make it functional.

The bigger (empty) dresser was moved into the closet which I will show you in a second and the smaller dresser was moved over just a tad to make way for the crib. Currently the linens on the crib are ocean themed (given to me by my cousin) but once I get done recovering them, they will match my quilt that I made. I also left the highchair in their for the time being because there is no space in my dinning room for it. The black thing on the wall is part of a tv mount which I will take off later once I am able to borrow an impact drill from my husband. The black trashcan in between the crib and the dresser is going to be my diaper pail (as soon as I purchase a liner for it).

Since I moved the bed I had a small space where I could place my rocking chair and chunky nightstand. I think this is my favorite part of the room.

So I;m sure you are probably wondering where all of the baby stuff that was previously taking up my guest bed went. Well it got stuffed up to the ceiling in our small guest bedroom closet along with that large dresser. As of right now all of Liam's clothes that are hanging fit fine in there but once I do more reorganizing, specifically with the drawers of the two dressers, I'm not sure if that will change.

I know this isn't spectacular or anything but it is what I have to deal with right now. I'm not painting the room since we are renting and will hopefully be out soon. I might decide to hang some art work however once it gets closer to time. Even though I am happy with the work that I put into this nursery, I am hoping we will never have to use it and will be moved in to our new home soon :(.





♥ Mrs. Suzie