Sweet Little Bird Mobile

I finished Little Girl's mobile! Woot woot! I really love how it turned out and am loving how all the little details in her nursery are coming together!

I've seen a lot of paper mobiles around Pinterest that are just beautiful. I combined a few of the mobiles I had seen to create my own version. Of course, mine is more simple and less fussy than most of the mobiles I have seen, but that's just the way I roll. I love simple.

I started out with four sheets of cardstock paper in the colors of Little Girl's nursery. I drew a bird on a piece of scrap paper and cut it out to use as a stencil. Then, I just traced and cut out several birds in each color. I did a dozen of each color, but ended up only using about half of them. For the wings, I made a heart shaped stencil with scrap paper, then traced and cut out 2 dozen wings per color. Again, I only used about half of them, though. If you have a heart shaped paper cutter, it would save a ton of time! I folded my cardstock in half lengthwise and cut half of the heart along the crease so the wings came out pre-folded and I only had to cut half as much. Overall, it was 2-3 hours total of scissor work. Thankfully, it was pretty mindless and something I could do while watching tv.

To hang the birds, I laid out a long piece of transparent thread and placed it down the middle of each bird. I put a bead of hot glue on top of the thread and placed a wing on top. The wing allowed me to hide the glue nicely. I alternated the direction and color of the birds going down the thread. After the thread was glued on, I flipped my birds over and glued a wing on the back of each bird (with no thread going through). I did one thread with five birds, three threads with 4 birds, and three threads with 3 birds.

I purchased a thin, wooden dowel and a wooden quilting hoop from A.C. Moore to hang the birds on. I pulled out the solid hoop (I tossed the hoop with the screw), then painted the solid hoop and dowel light green. I cut the dowel to make two rods for the center of the hoop. I made them into an X and hot glued them to the inside of the quilting hoop.

After the paint was dry, I tied my strings of birds onto the hoop. Originally, I had planned to put strings of birds around hoop, on each dowel rod, and in the center. However, as I started hanging my birds, I realized that would be too many birds for the medium sized hoop I purchased. I ended up using the string of five birds down the middle, then alternated the strings with 3 and 4 birds around the hoop. Tying the transparent thread onto the hoop was surprisingly difficult because I was trying to hold the mobile upright so the strings didn't get tangled and tie knots at the same time. My hubby rescued me and held the mobile up while I tied. I ended up putting a bead of hot glue on the inside of the hoop and sticking my thread to it to hold it in place, then tying the thread on. That kept the thread from sliding all around and generally causing chaos. ;)

To hang the finished product, I tied four strings around the hoop and then gathered them at the top and tied them together. Mine is actually temporarily held up by the transparent thread and a thumb tack. Classy, I know. But, later this week, I am going to replace the threads I used for hanging the mobile with some stronger fishing wire and attach the fishing wire to a hook hanging from the ceiling. Just making sure it doesn't come falling down! :)

This entire project only cost me about $7! Definitely an economical project with a big impact! You could easily change the colors and animals/shapes to make a mobile to match any nursery!

A non-nursery related post is coming up next. Can you believe it's almost Thanksgiving?!

Linking up to Thrifty Decor Chick, Work it Wednesday, Thrifty Thursday, and The Humble Brag link parties!

Etsy Love

I'm finally getting the hang of Etsy! I know, I'm a slow learner. There's just SO much on Etsy that it seems overwhelming. Here are some of my recent Etsy purchases for Little Girl's room:

I mentioned my friend Heather's Etsy shop called What is Perfect a long time ago and have been drooling over her yarn wrapped letters ever since. I asked Heather if she could do a flat letter that I could hang on the wall and here's what she came up with. She did a fabulous job! I love, love, love how it turned out! It's one of my favorite things in Little Girl's room! The bird kills me with cuteness!

The print I ordered from Katie Daisy's shop called The Wheatfield came and I couldn't be happier with it! Such happy colors and great quality! Now to stop myself from ordering everything in her shop... Both the yarn wrapped letter and this print will go on Little Girl's gallery wall.

We were looking for a cute basket for the end table that would corral all the middle of the night feeding essentials. We were immediately sold when we saw this basket from Hip Baby Boutique in the adorable urban zoologie bird print! Even Jeremy thought it was perfect and it got a "cute" out of him, which is a lot for a man when speaking of girly decorations! Haha! :)

Painting and a Prayer

Hi again, friends! It may seem like I've disappeared lately. We're in the middle of four different projects right now and everything is half done. We're chipping away at them, it's just taking for-ev-er! Good news, though! I finally finished one project! Hooray!

I've been searching for artwork to go above Little Girl's dresser. Because of the board and batten, a shelf seemed a bit much. I didn't want to do a collection of anything because the opposite wall will be a gallery wall. I was getting pretty frustrated because walls are not the easiest thing for me to decorate.

Thankfully, I remembered I had an extra canvas on hand that has endured 3 moves and still had nothing on it. It was a good size (16x20), so I decided to do a painting for above Little Girl's dresser.

Jeremy and I picked a couple meaningful verses for Little Boy's nursery back when we were pregnant with him and loved having them on the wall to be reminded of and to pray over him. We've been stewing over verses for Little Girl's room and finally decided on two. Painting one of the verses on the canvas seemed like a no brainer decision! We settled on a paraphrase of 1 Peter 3:3-4:

"Let your adornment come from the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit which is very precious in the sight of God."

When I read this verse, I instantly think of my friend Julie. She displays this verse so well with her life and I learn so much by watching her live it out. She is strong and hard working all while being servant hearted, a great listener, thoughtful, kind, considerate, and gentle. She respects, loves, and considers her husband well, is not attention seeking, knows when to speak and when to be silent, and serves her family and church self sacrificially without complaint and without calling attention to her service. I'm so thankful to be in her community group and pray that God will work these things in my own life and in Little Girl's life.

So, on to the painting! First, I used wrapping paper to make a stencil of how I wanted the center of the canvas to look and traced it with pencil onto my canvas. I originally tried to free-hand it, but couldn't get the shape as symmetrical as I wanted. I used wrapping paper to make the stencil because it was the biggest sheet of paper I had around the house. By using paper to make a stencil, I was able to fold the paper in half, draw on the design, then cut it out, insuring that both sides were the same.

I painted the border of the canvas white to freshen it up since my canvas was old and yellowed and had a lot of pencil marks on it. Then looking at a picture of Little Girl's crib bumper, I lightly drew some of the patterns and prints onto my canvas with a pencil. I wish I had taken a picture of this step, but I was yapping on the phone. Real life, people. ;)

I filled in all of my drawings with acrylic craft paint and good paintbrushes. I did one color at a time, allowing each color to dry before starting the next color. With something this precise, you really need a good liner brush and round brush. No snitching your kid's paintbrushes for this project! Use a decent brush. It'll save you lots of frustration!

After the border was complete, I painted the inside with two coats of green. Then, I went back and added a blue border to the center shape to make it stand out. I drew on my text with a pencil, then used a liner brush to paint on the words. I wanted the center words to stand out, so I used a paint pen to draw them on first, then painted the blue over the white to give it a shadowed effect. (Thanks, Amy and Jeremy, for helping me decide on background and text colors!)

Excuse the sun glare!

And here it is, all finished!

I love how colorful it is and love how it looks against the pink walls. And did I mention, because I already had the canvas, green, blue, and white paint on hand already, this project only ran me $3?! All I needed to buy were two shades of pink paint and a white paint pen. The paint was on sale for 50 cents a piece at Michael's and I used a coupon for the paint pen. Score for cheap artwork! If you are planning to do something similar and have nothing on hand, it is still very inexpensive and would probably run you about $15 between the canvas and paints. Still not bad at all for a large piece of art! 

Hope you all have a great weekend! 

Linking up to Thrifty Decor Chick and The Humble Brag link party!

Finally a Fan

Whew, it's been a whirlwind past two weeks! We've been super busy with family visits and celebrations. But, things are settling back down again...well, at least for the time being. There's only so much settling down you can do when you are 2 months out from having a baby! ;)

I haven't shared much of our upstairs on the blog, but I'll tell you, it's a sea of gold knobs and boob lights. You know you're jealous. ;) Rewind back to the beginning of this year. We were tired of staring at the gold light and ready to install a ceiling fan in our room so we wouldn't have to sweat through another summer of stale air. We planned out when we were going to do each house project in the coming months and scheduled the fan project for May. Unfortunately, one night in April, we came home to find the glass dome had fallen out of the lighting fixture, hit our footboard, and shattered all over our room. We weren't sad about the light, but were definitely sad that it buggered up our bed. Whomp whomp.

 Here's what the light looked like pre-disaster.

We decided to just deal with the domeless light for another month, then replace it in May as budgeted for and planned. Well, in the meantime, we found out we were pregnant. We shifted all of our projects around to accommodate coming baby plans. The fan kept getting moved down the list. Month after month... Until, here we were in October still staring at this monstrosity. Time to get on it already!

Here it is (in the trash pile, minus the lightbulbs) in all of its broken glory. Classy. 

While Jeremy's parents were in town last week, his dad helped him install a squeaky new ceiling fan in our bedroom. Jeremy and I have hung many ceiling fans together, but were grateful for the help installing this time since I'm ginormously pregnant and it was very heavy! The fan is from Home Depot and was actually not that expensive. You can find it here. I really like the dome light in this fan as opposed to the three hanging light fixtures common in fans. It just seems softer and more bedroom-ish to me and not so blindingly bright.

 The new fan is SO much easier on the eyes than that broken boob light, don't you think? Now if we can just carve out some time to do something about those yellow walls that have been bugging me since we moved in... ;)

As a side note, yes, we like ceiling fans. Go ahead and call the design police on us. We are former Floridians, so fans are normal to us and necessary for coping with summer heat. I actually kinda think they're homey. Ok, glad we cleared that up... Haha!

Off to take a nap. Because, apparently, that's what pregnant women do best. :)