Tags
crib skirt, curtains, DIY, dropcloth, fabric, nursery, nursery novel, sewing project
i haven’t always been very domestic. maybe it was all the learning to play softball at 6, running around the house collecting frogs, fort-building, and other tomboyish activities throughout my childhood that delayed that part of my genetic makeup, but literally, until my junior year in college i was pretty much an idiot in the kitchen, had never grown anything (at least anything of real importance) from seed, and could barely have turned on a sewing machine, much less created anything with one.
fast forward to today and i can definitely hold my own in the kitchen (no one’s signing me up for iron chef, but i do ok), have a garden that will never equal my grandfather’s but gets better every year, and…. still can’t for the life of me make anything worthwhile on the sewing machine. oh well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.
so that’s why you can be very sure that all the following projects were products of my brain, but definitely not my hands. i capitalized on the long visit from my parents and a borrowed sewing machine, and my mom and i tackled two big sewing projects in the nursery.
Sewing Project #1: nursery curtains
so remember this inspiration picture from earlier?
we used it as a guide to make the nursery curtains. for $9.99 i bought a 9’x6′ canvas dropcloth from lowe’s, washed it, and cut it in half.
then mom and i played around with getting the perfect length. not easy to do when your fabric hasn’t exactly been created with squareness in mind. but after much trial and error, we got the length pinned right and mom did some hemming magic on the sewing machine.
i still have to change out those faux wood blinds for either bamboo blinds or a roman shade with a light blocker lining, but not bad for $10 in fabric, a clearance curtain rod, and two packs of curtain clips, right?
Sewing Project #2: DIY crib skirt
i didn’t have a clear idea what kind of fabric i was going for when making the crib skirt, but i knew i’d use this tutorial to get the job done. so mom and i headed out to joann fabrics and proceeded to look through every bolt of fabric in the store. this one was too girly, that one too boring, and that one not the right shade. and on and on. but finally! a winner:
the same applely green as the walls, with a subtle polka dot. but being behind the dark espresso slats of our crib plus being at floor level, it definitely didn’t bring an overwhelming amount of green to the room. and it looks great with all my crib sheets. score.
i won’t go through all the details of the creation of these guys since we basically just followed the tutorial (with the exception of using the sewing machine instead of iron on hem tape), but in no time at all we had all 3 panels hemmed and velcroed into place.
now i just can’t wait until we get our crib mattress so i can see how everything comes together!