Our Nursery*

Well folks, our Nursery is about as complete as it going to get. With a week and a half left until my due date, I've done all I can until baby comes! I will say that I am very, very happy with how it turned out. While there are still a few things that I want to do after baby arrives [like get some canvas prints of baby photos for above the bookshelves] I think we're at a good stopping point.

When I originally started thinking about the nursery, we both had agreed that since we were not finding out the gender of the baby, that neutral was the way to go. But, we didn't want just any neutral. We wanted neutral with a twist. Something that would easily be adaptable to a boy or a girl, but DIFFERENT than what was out there. We also wanted something simple, that could easily transition post-baby. This meant something completely unique to us. We instantly fell in love with the idea of dark walls & bright colors & this was the mission I had in mind when we set out for decorations. Plus, with this room, we can throw in plenty of pink OR teal to make it more gender specific when the time is right.

I may or may not have also thrown in my obsession with the Dave Matthews Band into the room, as you will see with the concert posters hanging above the dresser. Weird. Yes. But me? 110%. 

We spent so much time in this room. I was so grateful to M for all of his help & hard work putting EVERYTHING together for us, helping with the painting & not screaming at me when I was constantly telling him "it is not CENTER. It needs to be CENTER. Where is the tape measure??" OCD at it's finest, folks.

Nursery Details
Crib: Babi Italia Eastside Lifestyle Crib from Babies R Us.
Mobile: Made by me. Instructions available here.
Hanging Star Light: Purchased at Fireworks in Seattle many, many years ago!
Curtains: Bird Flourish Curtains from Urban Outfitters.
Rug: ZigZag Printed Rug from Urban Outfitters.
Dresser: Bought at a used furniture store here in town & re-purposed. That project is available here. Paint color is "Provence" by Annie Sloan
DMB Wall Art: EBay!
Art Above Crib: An Etsy find, from the Pink Puppy Paper Co! Love these prints so much!
Glider: Target!
Yellow Blanket on Glider: Handmade by one of my Mom's best friends.
DMB Quilt on Glider Footrest: Handmade out of my old DMB concert tshirts by my AMAZING friend, Cortney.
Stuffed Lion: Target!
Giraffe in Crib: A baby shower gift from friends.
Lamb & Bins: Both from Target.

Make Your Own Crib Mobile

A while back, when we were deciding what to do with the nursery and how to decorate it, I decided that the mobile was one of the things that I wanted to be slightly different than the normal things you can buy at Babies R Us. Not to mention the fact I really wasn't liking anything that was available. So, I searched and searched and found a mobile on Etsy that I loved ... but did NOT want to spend $35 on when it looked incredibly easy to recreate on my own.

So, I set out for recreating it. This project was so easy and looks so good in our nursery! Not to mention the fact that it is totally customizable to your theme & colors. All in all, this project cost about $6.00. SIX DOLLARS! You really can't beat that. Just to let you know, I completely fumbled my way through it with nothing but looking at a photo to guide me. So if you know of a better way to do this, please feel free to do so! However, I promise you ... this is extremely easy!

First things first. Because of the theme of our nursery, I used six different colors for the six different felt balls. You'll be making three small ones and three large ones. I have seen mobiles like this with only two colors, such as white and teal, or black and pink. Whatever your fancy is and whatever you are going with. (Excuse my picture quality in the photos below. It was rainy and dark when I was working on these over the weekend, which means I had zero natural light to shoot with!! They aren't the greatest.]

You are first going to want to cut out even circles for all your felt puff balls. Or whatever you want to call them. Really, I don't have an official name and I feel weird saying "balls" over and over again in this post. Yup. I'm 31 years old. Either way, that's what they are!

But I digress. You are going to want the same number for all your small ones and all your large ones. For this mobile, I used three large felt balls [hee hee! Ok, I'll stop now.] and three small ones. For what is shown, I used eight total felt circles for each ball, both large and small. Use whatever you have around the house to outline your pattern.

See? It doesn't have to be fancy. Technical expertise at work!! I used a pot lid for my large circles [getting two large circles on each felt sheet, four sheets in total for each color] and a random dish that seemed like a good size for the smaller ones [getting four small circles on each felt sheet, two in total for each color].

Please know that I used eight circles for each felt ball. If you want to make them a little more dense, feel free to use more. Just make sure you have an even number [I'll explain why below].

Once you have everything cut out and separated, you will then start putting them together. Take one felt circle and fold it in half. Then fold it in half again, until you get the image below. On the second fold, you'll create a point down at the bottom. At this point I took the hot glue gun and upon the second fold, put a quick dab of hot glue in there to hold it together and to help it keep this shape. Sorry for not taking a photo of that, but it will make sense when you do it. Essentially, where my fingers are holding the felt, I'm holding the glue in place so it can dry.

You're going to want to do this for ALL your felt circles, large and small. I did one felt ball at a time, from start to finish, but do whatever works best for you. Once you have them all glued as shown above, then you are going to start assembling. Because I used eight circles total, I used four felt circles per half [as shown below].

There really is no rhyme or reason to putting these together. Do whatever you think looks best, but essentially, make sure that all glued points come together. This right here is the underside, but the top half looks like half a puffy circle. You'll glue everything together in the middle.

Now, since I used four felt circles for the top half of the ball, I used four felt circles for the bottom half ... eight in total. If you use five felt circles for one half, use five for the bottom half ... ten in total. You get the idea. Make sure you use an even amount otherwise your felt ball will look a little top heavy and won't be uniform in shape or size.

Once you have both halves glued together in the centers, throw some hot glue right smack in the middle and push the two halves together.

Once you are completed, you will have a ball that looks like this:

And when you are done with ALL of them, they will look like this:

Once you have all the felt balls together, it's time to assemble. I used a heavy cotton thread that I bought at the craft store, and the hoop is nothing more than the inside portion of a cross stitch hoop, that you can buy for dirt cheap at any crafting store as well. This particular one is six inches wide.

Make sure you cut plenty of thread before assembling. My mobile hangs about three and a half feet from ceiling to the lowest ball on the mobile, but it's completely up to you how far down you want it to come. So make sure you cut plenty of extra thread to leave room for error, room for adjustment, etc. But essentially, you want two felt balls per strand, one small one and one large one. Play with the way the hang and the distance between the two. I liked mine a little off center and not all even to fill out out a little more, but do what you think looks best.

To attach to the ceiling, I used a simple ceiling hook that screwed into the ceiling in the nursery. I bought it for $.50 at Home Depot.

All in all, this project took me about an hour and a half to complete. The mobile looks gorgeous in our nursery and is definitely unique. Not to mention inexpensive and easy! If you have any questions, let me know in the comments. I'm sure I could have explained a little easier, but since this is my first tutorial, I'm sure I forgot something! ENJOY!

Ramblings*

Operation Nursery is in full swing. My mom, who is amazing and completely excited about her first grandchild making an appearance next year, purchased our crib for us last weekend. It was the first piece of furniture for the nursery that we had taken care of, so we were excited when we got the call that it had arrived. It's gorgeous, and looks great put together.

We've also been on the search for a good dresser. I have been told by many, many people in my life that a changing table is a waste of money [I believe it] so our idea was to find a sturdy dresser [one that will last past the infant years!], re-purpose it & make it fit into what we are wanting it for. And then we'll slap a changing pad on top of it. The likelihood of me or M running into the nursery to change each and every diaper is slim, so we are trying to be as practical as we can. I've also started working on some of the wall decorations & in search for some great fabric for crib sheets and curtains. I foresee this coming Thanksgiving weekend as being one large craft fest ... of course, after all the Christmas decorations are up!

We also had our 24 week checkup appointment this past week. Everything measures right where it should be and that little heartbeat was perfect. We started discussing my birthing plan, which was scary in it's own right. I know I'm only 24 weeks, but it's amazing that I have to actually start thinking about all of this already. There are so many details that are so important to me & I can only hope that if my midwife is not on call, that the doctor that is respects my wishes & my husband can remember the things that I want in case I'm too out of it or loopy to communicate properly!  I'm constantly amazed that I've made it this far in my pregnancy, and cannot believe how utterly quick it is flying by. We say thank you every day to what we have, and are enjoying these last couple of months that we have together before we welcome our new addition. Life is truly good in the Boho household.

But it's not all work & no play for us! The ninja got another taste at some good music this past weekend when we headed North a bit for the Taylor Swift concert. I will admit that T-Swizzle is a serious, serious guilty pleasure of mine. I saw her open up for another country band a few years back and I was hooked. Last year's headlining performance was about as entertaining as it gets [and as a serious music junkie, I have been to a LOT of concerts!] so when tickets when on sale back in April, I jumped on the chance with some other girlfriends. Lauren was one of them, and since her camera took better pictures than mine, you can check out her photos on her blog. But we had a blast, and it was a much needed girls night out. Getting home at 1am and having to be up at 6 am for work the next day was rough, but completely worth it. I know that I personally sang every word to all 19 songs that were performed and I'm telling you ... the girl is a top notch performer through and through! Minus the screaming 8 year old's that took up a majority of the 14,000 people in attendance, it was a great night.

I am very much looking forward to Thanksgiving as we have some of our nearest and dearest friends over for the big day, followed by a nice long and hopefully relaxing weekend. We're doing turkey day pot-luck style this year, which will make things nice and easy for me, as I only have to prepare a couple of items. And hopefully we won't have a ridiculous amount of leftovers! I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday with friends & family! 

The Nursery Begins*

This past weekend, M & I tackled what will eventually become the nursery. It was a big undertaking. A project that we knew was going to take a whole weekend to even just begin & something we had been putting off. But with the weeks flying by, I was getting antsy and wanting to get started with the big stuff, so I could focus on the little stuff.

The room that will become our nursery has functioned as our guest bedroom for the four years we've lived in this house. It was always known that it would eventually become the nursery, but over time, as we struggled with getting pregnant, it really just sort of collected junk. We never went in there. It ONLY ever got organized if we had a guest coming in [a rare occasion]. It went unloved. In order to get that room cleared out, we had to clear out our office. We only have three bedrooms in our small, 1200 sf home, so there's only so much space. The office was now becoming the office/guest bedroom & was another room that had been neglected.

So Saturday was spent organizing. It was very happy day when Saturday afternoon, we had gotten furniture moved to it's respective places and the now nursery was completely empty! That poor room had not been empty since the day we moved in! :)

Then Sunday came the fun! We had decided on a color weeks ago and bought a gallon of paint for when the day came:



I am so in love with this color and have so many plans for the nursery. The route we are taking is a little non-traditional, but because we are not finding out the sex of the baby, I wanted to do something fun. And I just couldn't bear to go the yellow/green route. I'll post some teasers here and there, but I want to do a big reveal in a couple of months! But essentially, we are going with this color & a lot of bright colors as accents. It will be gorgeous!

My husband was such a trooper over the course of the weekend. Saturday was a lot of work, and then we spent all day Sunday painting the first and second coat. There wasn't a lot of relaxation time. Once we finished the painting, we decided to tackle the one piece of furniture that we owned because we figured ... why not?! We had already done so much! A couple of months back, I had been selected for an Operation Homefront baby shower. It was nomination only [I have amazing friends! I had no idea until I was actually selected!] and we walked away with some really great baby items, including a beautiful bassinet, a crib mattress & plenty of other goodies. It was amazing.

Isn't my sweetie adorable? He was SUCH a trooper! And I love him for dealing with my urgent need to get things done this past weekend. He's in for more as my nesting instinct increases, but I'm so glad we got so many big things done while we could. He's a champ & I love him for it!

And, just for shits & giggles, meet our lovable pooch, Cooper. He's not the brightest crayon in the box, but his adorableness makes up for it. He's a treeing walker coonhound that we rescued as a puppy last year after my beagle died, and he makes us laugh every single day. He's adorable & one of three pooches in our household. Always exciting here!