tadahouse: The one with the... Baby Nursery (Part 3

With the large furniture items in the nursery completed, we move onto other projects, specifically those involving more fabric and textiles.

Dave's mom gave us this bassinet to use. It was the same bassinet that Dave and all his siblings used as babies as well as most of his nieces and nephews.

Pluto so nice to test out the bassinet for his baby brother:

We wanted to change up the bassinet covering to match our nursery decor, so I once again went to Pinterest to find some ideas. I found this bassinet with a simple white skirt and a black ribbon trim on the bottom:

So off to the fabric store I went to get some thicker white fabric and navy ribbon. I was able to reuse the inner lining of the bassinet (the bowl part) but unfortunately there was no real easy way to sew the bassinet cover other than using the measuring tape, eyeballing it, and a lot of pinning. This is what I started with for the skirt:

Once the skirt was done, I sewed the decorative navy ribbon on the top and added a larger and smaller ribbon trim towards the bottom:

Probably the hardest part of the bassinet was covering the hood. I pinned the fabric onto the hood and sewed elastic on the top and bottom for the outside fabric. Then I had to hand sew the outside fabric to the inside fabric, which took a while. (I now understand the wonders of a thimble!) I realized that there was a small gap between the hood and the base of the bassinet so I sewed a small flap to cover the gap and then covered the seam with more navy ribbon.

Here is the finished bassinet! Front view:

Back view. See the little flaps on the hood?

Side view:

Even before we turned the room into a nursery, I already had these Ikea Merete curtains in "Bleached." I am a fan of curtains with grommets and at $28 for a pair of 57'x98" curtains, it is a steal! They're pretty thick curtains and although they are not room darkening, they do block out some of the light.

But white curtains seemed a little boring for the nursery, especially with all the white furniture the bottom half of the wall being white as well. I found this post on Pinterest for DIY painted striped curtains. It looked easy enough and I figured it wouldn't be a huge deal if I messed it up because I only spent $28 on the curtains themselves.

First I hung the curtains up and hemmed them to the right length. Next, I started measuring the curtains to mark it and tape where I the stripes to be. While trying to measure out stripes I learned two important lessons: 1) it's not easy to measure the fabric and make straight lines and 2) trying to work on the floor and being 32 weeks pregnant doesn't work so well together. Dave came to my rescue and not only did he have an ingenious idea of how to draw out the curtains, he also helped me finish the task no time!

Dave recommended that we just measure the two ends and then use a chalk line to draw a horizontal line. From there it was super easy to put down the blue tape so we could paint! He also reminded me that when they are hanging, the stripes on the curtain aren't going to look exactly straight anyway so no one would know if they are a little off.

For the navy stripes we used the same BM Old Navy paint that we used on the dresser and nightstand. Following the tutorial, I added textile medium to the paint. Warning: the curtain eats up A LOT of paint. Using foam rollers we painted two coats, taking off the tape and then retaping in between coats. After the two coats, we were done! Or so we thought...

When we hung the curtains back up and up against the light, we quickly realized that there were some spots that we missed. So I took a foam brush and touched up the spots. Easy peasy, right? Unfortunately, for some reason the touch up paint looked different from the rolled-on paint and the curtain looked very splotchy. :( By then I was also running out of the BM paint and I decided that it wasn't so economical to use good quality paint on curtains. So I went to Home Depot and just got some cheaper paint color-matched to BM Old Navy. But the HD paint quality was slightly different and we ended up having to paint 3 more coats before the paint looked even and not splotchy. What seemed like an easy project took us a really long time!!

So lesson learned for anyone who is planning on painting curtains: 1) make sure you use the same paint and premix a lot of it with the textile medium. Then use that same mixed paint on every coat! 2) Do not try to spot paint with a brush because it will look splotchy. It's better just to roll on another coat. 3) Always pull off the tape before the paint dries!

Here is one of the finished painted striped curtain panels in the nursery:

As I mentioned in the post about the nursery furniture, the crib was the only piece of furniture that we got new. My sister and brother-in-law got us a convertible crib as a gift for the baby! After Dave put the crib together I started looking into a crib skirt.

I liked this crib skirt from Pottery Barn but was not willing to pay $60 for it!

So I searched for tutorials for how to make a crib skirt and found this post:

The nice thing about making an adjustable crib skirt is that you can move it up and down based on the height of the mattress. The drop-side cribs were declared to be "unsafe" so newer cribs are made so that you adjust the mattress up and down. The crib skirt I made is actually just long pieces of fabric with ribbon sewed on the top that tie to the metal base. As the crib gets adjusted lower, I can retie the crib skirt so that it is higher and not dragging on the floor.

Here's the finished crib skirt: