NASA Engineer. Slow triathlete. Wannabe graphic designer. Crafter. Science junkie.
Posts tagged nursery
Door Decor
1One of the many (MANY) craft projects that’s been on my list for a while was some kind of cute door decoration for Emma’s room. This was pretty low priority and I wasn’t sure it would ever happen, but it turns out that Joann’s is running a contest via Facebook called “Create with 8″ that challenges people to make something using 8 materials from a list of about 20 different items. Winners get a $250 gift card, which turned out to be just enough motivation for me to finally knock a door decoration off my list! Who knows if I’ll actually see anything, but either way, I get to enjoy my creation.
Since the whole idea was to use 8 materials from the list, I picked the 8 materials I thought would work best for what I had in mind (styrofoam, yarn, felt, buttons, scrapbook paper, ribbon, paint, and a wooden letter) and roamed the aisles at Joann’s with a general blue/green color scheme in mind. When I got home (I did this a couple Fridays ago when I had taken the day off work), I just pulled everything out of the bag and made the rest up as I went along.
I cut out the interior of a styrofoam disk to make a ring, then wrapped the ring in yarn. The yarn was just one skein that varied in color from white to yellow to green to blue — but when I started wrapping, I was surprised to see that it ended up making stripes around the outside. It was a neat and totally unintended effect.
The white background is a piece of felt, and I sewed a ring of buttons around the edge. I painted a wooden letter E, then backed it with two different sheets of scrapbook paper. After that, I just added a piece of ribbon and it was ready to hang on Emma’s door!
DIY Crib Skirt
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I went into labor with Emma on a Sunday — the exact Sunday, in fact, that I had planned on finishing up a couple projects for her nursery. I cut the fabric and made the bias tape for a crib skirt at the end of July. I finally sewed it together in October. And yes, I’m finally blogging about it in December!
Side panel
I found several good tutorials for making crib skirts, and chose to go with a pretty simple technique. Instead of making a full, four-sided skirt with a swath of unseen fabric in the middle that sits under the mattress, I “cheated.” My “crib skirt” is really three separate pieces — one for the front and one for each side. I didn’t make anything for the back, since the crib sits against the wall and you wouldn’t see it anyway.
Each piece is attached with a combination of sew-in and self-adhesive velcro. The loop side of pieces of sew-in velcro is sewn to the fabric, while the hook side of pieces of the self-adhesive stuff is stuck to the crib. For the front, the hook pieces are stuck to the metal mattress springs and on the sides, the pieces are stuck to the wood. Since it’s on the inside where you’ll never see it, I wasn’t worried about leaving sticky residue on the wood.
Side and front panels
But the best part of making panels instead of a more “traditional way” crib skirt is that this one can be easily adjusted when we have to lower the crib mattress in the future! For the front panel, instead of having to re-hem the whole panel, I can just relocate the velcro so that more of the fabric is tucked under the mattress. The side panels can stay right where they are, since they’re attached to the crib frame itself. Clever!
I also taught myself how to make an inverted box pleat to add a little detail. There are two pleats on the front panel and one on each side panel. This technique was really easy — the most challenging part is just making sure to measure correctly. I made 2-inch pleats, which means adding 8 inches of fabric to whatever the desired finished length is.
Ta da! Even though it took me 6 months to finish this project, the true time spent was only a few hours. I loved the way it turned out and it makes Emma’s crib look so much cuter.
This ‘n That
3253 days
by saroy
in Bits & Pieces
Top Left: Jose went to Barnes and Noble last weekend and came home with a few books for Emma, including a thick board book of high contract black and white patterns meant for infants (who see contrast better than anything else at that age). A couple days ago, I put her down on her play mat for some tummy time and let her “read” her book at the same time. Multitasking already! That’s my girl.
Top Center: This afternoon we took Emma to Panera! It was only her second outing to anywhere other than the pediatrician and the mom’s group at the hospital. She slept in her carseat the whole time, covered up by a blanket, and Jose and I had a lovely relaxing lunch.
Top Right: Biiig yawn.
Center Left: When I went into labor, the dining room table was still covered with fabric and materials for some of my sewing projects. I usually set up my cutting mat there since it’s the best large, flat surface available. I kept thinking I’d clean it up after Emma arrived, but then I realized it’d be a lot easier to just accept that as a low priority task during maternity leave. So I went all in — I moved my sewing machine from the bonus room upstairs to the dining room table! Now I can do a little sewing while Emma naps without having to carry the baby monitor upstairs.
Center: Emma’s first trip to HEB! We took her on a quick grocery run on Thursday night. We just put her carseat right into the cart, which severely limited the available space for groceries but fortunately we didn’t need much.
Center Right: The rug that I ordered for the nursery back in May FINALLY arrived! It’s nice and soft and super cute but guess what? No flying pig! What the heck! That was one of the biggest selling points of the whole design! Upon further investigation, it seems like the flying pig is only on the larger versions of the rug. LAME. Oh well — the 4×6 size that we got is still cute.
Bottom Left: Emma screaming. Yep. That about sums it up.
Bottom Center: I’ve been happily partaking in an appropriately timed (i.e. between pumping sessions) alcoholic beverage from time to time now that I’m no longer pregnant. I was very excited to find St. Arnold’s Oktoberfest already available at HEB. Yay!
Bottom Right: I bought a Moby wrap a few weeks ago, but then was slow to try it out because the instructions said baby should weigh at least 8 pounds. So after getting confirmation this week that Emma has busted that milestone, I tried it out for the first time on Friday night. (After testing it with a teddy bear, I might add!) Emma seemed to like it all right — she sat in it for about 10 minutes before starting to fuss. But she’d been fussy before that, so it may not have been related to being in the wrap. I liked it a lot, and plan to give it another try tomorrow. I really like the idea of being able to put her in there while walking around the house or even running an errand. We’ll see!
“Did Do” List #2
3It should come as a surprise to no one that I didn’t quite finish Emma’s nursery before she was born. (Hey, I thought I had 8 more days! And a couple of those were weekend days!) I still have a couple sewing projects that are half-finished, and some photo frames to fill. I still plan to post a ton of nursery photos when everything does get finished, hopefully by the end of maternity leave if not earlier. But today I’m happy to report that I finished putting up the cute wall decals I ordered from Graphic Spaces on Etsy. We had to wait until after she was born to order the name portion, so that just arrived last week.
So cute!! I love them.
Here’s what else I’ve done today as of about 6:30 — in addition to the wall decals:
- Slept from 6:00 until 10:00 (!) after Jose volunteered for the 7 a.m. feeding
- Given Emma a bottle 4 times (and Jose’s fed her twice)
- Took Emma to the moms group at the hospital, where we had one semi-successful (!?) nursing session
- Stopped at Sonic on the way home from mom’s group for a cream slush!
- Changed 6 diapers
- Pumped 5 times
- Took a shower
- Made coffee and ate both breakfast and lunch
- Talked to Melissa on the phone for way longer than she probably wanted to talk to me
- Cooked a pasta casserole for recipe club
- Wrote this blog entry
And in about 20 minutes, I’m leaving Emma for some more daddy/daughter time and going to recipe club! All in all I’d say it’s been a pretty banner day, probably my most productive yet! Even if I get nothing done for the rest of the week, I’ll still consider it a success!
Space Stuff & Baby Stuff
14The weekend was filled with two things: space stuff and baby stuff. Or three things, if you want to get more technical: space stuff, baby stuff, and astronomy stuff.
SpaceX was scheduled to launch their Dragon spacecraft to the ISS early Saturday morning — and I mean early to the tune of 3:55 a.m. Jose is supporting this mission as part of NASA’s engineering team so he was up at 2 a.m. to get to Mission Control at 3 a.m., and then I got up at 3:45 to watch the launch itself. The countdown went swimming right along. 3…2…1…liftoff… Except it didn’t lift off. The rocket engines lit for a couple seconds and then shut down, with the rocket still sitting firmly attached to the ground. The launch window for this mission was instantaneous, meaning SpaceX had to launch at exactly the right second in order to get to ISS, so I immediately knew that they wouldn’t be going anywhere that day. Turns out one of the engines on the rocket was measuring high pressure, so the computers automatically shut everything down. Their next launch attempt is tonight/tomorrow morning at 2:44 a.m. Houston time.
Testing a stroller and a glider
Even though the launch was aborted, Jose still ended up having to work a bunch over the weekend. Still, we managed to head out on what I called a “reconnaissance mission” to Babies R Us on Saturday afternoon. Now, a couple months ago, I ended up in the baby section at Target to buy a gift for someone else and was completely overwhelmed thinking about how we would eventually need a lot of that stuff ourselves. Cribs, car seats, strollers, bottles, baby monitors…with so many options, how does anyone ever figure out the right thing to buy??? But now I’ve had a little more time to think about what we need, and I’ve gotten some advice from people I trust. This time around, looking at all the stuff was actually kind of fun! We identified a car seat/stroller combo that we want, a glider/ottoman pair that should work well in the baby room, and narrowed down what style of crib we want. I doubt we’ll buy all of it from Babies R Us since their prices seem to run higher than Amazon, but it was nice to have a place to actually mess around with stuff and see how it worked.
One of the big decisions we still need to make is whether we want to cloth diaper or not. Frankly, I have no idea, so I am soliciting advice on the matter (as long as it is non-judgmental). Feel free to comment below!
I also ordered a rug for the baby room! I saw it on Zulily a couple months ago but wasn’t ready to pull the trigger. But both Jose and I loved it, and I kept thinking about it when I mentally decorated the baby room. When it unexpectedly went on sale through Zulily again over the weekend, I couldn’t resist any longer and got a 4′x6′ version to go in the middle of the room. The light blue clouds are the same color we’re using to painting the walls, and it’s got light green in there to match the bedding color we’re planning to use. Plus, it has a FLYING PIG. Which is really all you need.
So hooray for the first official nursery purchase! Well, except for the paint we already bought. We’d planned to paint this weekend, but Jose ended up working so much that we didn’t have time.
We wrapped up the weekend with what little we could see of the annular solar eclipse last night. It started at 7:40 and the sun set just after 8, so we didn’t have a great view but what we could see what pretty awesome! We actually watched it from Freebird’s while eating our burrito dinner and that turned out to be a better spot than our house would have been, since we had a clearer view of the horizon as the sun was setting. We even took our solar sunglasses! We got those two years ago when we went to KSC to see the STS-130 launch — after the launch, we went to the KSC Visitor’s Center and there were some people who work on the Solar Dynamics Observatory giving these out. See? Sometimes it’s good to be a pack rat.
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