My Handmade Nursery

Today I was at last able to get some decent pictures of the nursery. Baby Orion was born way back on January 8th and almost everything in the nursery was ready for him. I know I've mentioned a few projects in previous posts so here they are, finally!

A few weeks ago in the post about the Martha Stewart Fabric Crafts book I mentioned that I used her tutorial to make a bumper for my crib. I didn't follow it exactly, and thus my bumper is more floppy than I'd like, and I definitely ran into a few crafty disasters, but I'm really happy with it. Kim and my mom helped me finish it in time, only a week before Orion's due date.
We did a patchwork of a bunch of lovely Echino fabrics I bought both here at the Stitch Lab and back in LA at Michael Levine. Getting the order of the patchwork just right was pretty complicated, especially since I've never done quilting!
I'm proud of the finished product and Orion loves to stare at it, especially the black buses. You can also see the signed crib sheet from my shower that I love to read for Orion.

Also from my Texas baby shower, the monster mobile! Now making that mobile was a lot more time consuming than I'd figured, below is the way I did the layout. I actually made two mobiles since I had so many monsters,the second one is for over the changing table, and he loves it!Some of you know the story of my crib, so I'll just tell a condensed version here. Long story short I couldn't find the crib that I'd fallen in love with available anywhere, so I ended up buying it on Craigslist from someone in Orange County, CA! Had it shipped out here and then I painted the ends gray to match the nursery better (they were originally a blue shade that I detested). I had specifically fallen in love with the slats with their little circles, and still, I'm in love with it!We also did a DIY changing table inside our old armoire. Aaron built a little slide out shelf for the pad to go on and it works like a charm. We ended up taking the doors off it though, cause it was annoying to always have to open them up when O needed a changing. Also above on the back of our glider, you can see this quilt a friend of mine's mom made, its pretty amazing!
Here is the opposite view of the room with our little fold out futon for guests, I have been meaning to get it reupholstered so for the pic I just tucked the fabric's on, you get the idea. The little owl guy there is a crocheted gift from a friend in LA who owns Peanut Butter Dynamite, she also made the crochet throw hanging on the side of the crib. And note my Vampire Weekend print I got last year at the SXSW flat stock show.

Next, I'll talk about the lighting. We got this sweet anemone light (I'd seen on the Project Nursery blog) from my awesome Mother-in-law, but when it arrived it was soooo heavy. Probably weighed like 50lbs and the screws were all but impossible to get in, so we had to rig up this system to perch it up against the ceiling and screw it in (mind you I was like super prego during this project and basically no help). You might be able to see in the pic, but we used a bunch of craft books to get the right height, haha!The other lights are an LED strand of lights from Ikea that I added the little balls on. I got the colored balls from Thailand when we were on our trip and hadn't figured out a use til now. I had to hot glue them onto the strand and they ended up working perfectly.

Down in the corner there you can see the octopus chair I designed for Babystyle when I worked there in 2006, a family friend had it as a hand-me-down and was so generous to give it to us!

And lastly, I sewed up these little owls from a kit I bought at the Tate Modern in London when I was there last year, they're puppets!