Curiouser and curiouser...

    So the theme for Evie's nursery is... Alice in Wonderland! Jen and Jason figured that she should get a similarly literary nursery to keep the bookish theme going from one nursery to the next, and Jen has always loved Alice in Wonderland, so it was a natural choice for them. But they wanted to keep it classic, not Disney, and ended up with a very classy, subtle take on what could be a crazy over-the-top theme. Let's peruse! 

     My mom made these curtains from scratch when shopping around didn't turn up any inspiring options. The Alice in Wonderland clock on the wall was ordered online, but it doesn't actually keep time, so I don't think I'd recommend wherever it was bought from even if I knew. 

     Jen's had this old chair since college, and the pillow is hand-made, again by my very talented mom, from a fabric panel and leftover scraps from the curtains. The baby blanket on the back of the chair was crocheted by Amanda, because GOD WHY IS EVERYONE I KNOW SO DAMN TALENTED, and the rug is from Target.

     More amazing custom things! My parents collaborated on this tea party chandelier. It was originally just your standard builder-installed light fixture, but my mom painted it green, added some crystal trip to the top, and hunted around various thrift stores for teacups and saucers, then my dad drilled holes in them so they could be attached to the lamp. 

     Are you getting tired of "oh, it's custom" yet? My dad made that picture frame after we saw one in a store that was similarly shaped but cost well over a hundred dollars. 

     I guess technically this isn't directly thematic, but it was cute and Jen liked it when she saw it at Hobby Lobby (can you tell we like to shop there for home stuff?), so once it was painted the room's main colors, up it went. 

     Finally, this cute little detail. This lightswitch cover is from Etsy, and it's just a tiny little thing that adds a ton of personality.

     I don't know the names of the paint colors in this room, but the walls are a creamy warm beige and the ceiling is a classic baby pink that reflects softly onto the walls in a really dreamy way! 

Harry Potter Nursery II: Now in 3D!

     Ok so it's not actually in 3D, I just like to make my post titles sound like summer blockbusters sometimes. But let's be honest, 3D blog posts would just give you a headache anyway. The reason this gets a sequel title is because Jen and Jason moved a few months ago, so the nursery situation underwent some shaking up. It's mostly the same elements, with a few new things thrown in for fun. The biggest difference is that this room is so. much. bigger. than the old one. Let's have a look around, shall we?

 

     Hello, friend! This is the same owl light and bird cage from the previous house. The cage is from Hobby Lobby, nobody remembers where the owl lamp is from because our heads are filled with air dead flies and bits of fluff (obscure Harry Potter reference: engage!). 

     The wall art is custom, made by my best friend Stephen because he's at that level of talented where you want to hate him for it but then you're like "ehhh, he's a good kid." 

     This is new! They're a bunch of Harry Potter character illustrations from Etsy, framed in deliberately mismatched frame styles to visually reference the paintings in the staircase at Hogwarts. 

     And over here is the old-timey style trunk, which is also from Hobby Lobby, and an ornately framed Ikea mirror. 

     The wall color in this room was color-matched to Benjamin Moore's Woodlawn Blue. In the old nursery they didn't want the walls to be too blue because it would look like a boy's room, but that's the other exciting thing about their new house: the twins each get their own nurseries now! I'll be showing you Evie's on Wednesday, and it went in an entirely different decor direction...

Finished Harry Potter Nursery

     The Harry Potter nursery is now officially (ok, not offically. Mostly?) finished! I think there may still be some art added, and the idea of a rug has been bandied about for ages, but for the most part, this room is finito. And not a minute too soon, as those babies will be here before you know it. Let's do some looky-loo-ing. 

     Those amazing Hogwarts House baby-mascot paintings were done by my awesomely talented photographer/artist friend Stephen (check out his website if you want to go look at more pretty things/if you need a photographer in the Northern Virginia area!). I sent him a concept and basically said "make this happen all cute and stuff," and he definitely delivered; they are just beyond perfect.

     The cute swirly names above each crib were painted up all sparkly and nice by Amanda, and my mom made a curtain to cover the closet with some magical little sparkly stars on it (since it's a small room it made more sense to nix the door. The curtain rod it's hanging on is sturdy enough to do pull-ups on, so there's no worry about the babies yanking the whole thing down on themselves -- Jason does not mess around when it comes to safety). There are cute details all over this room!

     I think the best part of this room is how so many people have contributed their skills and efforts to pull it together. A nursery should be put together with love, and this one is definitely full of it. That sounds cheesy as all get-out, but what can I say. Babies! They make me go all sentimental! 

Nursery update!

     Phew. The painting of the nursery ended up being a way bigger debacle than anyone could have anticipated. First we painted it this color: 

     Which, to understate things a bit, was different from the swatch. I still have the swatch actually, and it doesn't look like that. On the paint card, it was a silvery color that leaned a bit blue. The color on the walls ended up being very much, obviously, distinctly blue, which we didn't want because A) it might seem too boyish, and the nursery needs to be somewhat gender neutral and B) Jen wasn't crazy about it, and she's going to have to spend so much time in there that nobody wants her sitting there late at night feeding the babies and thinking "I HATE THIS DAMN WALL COLOR." In a room destined to get a lot of use, and a lot of it when your frustration levels are already pretty high, you probably need to like the color.

     Adding to the trickery was the fact that we were shooting for a paint effect that was sort of swirly, like Dumbledore's pensieve. To do this, we had picked out a metallic paint, which we intended to swirl on top of a slightly darker, but still very similar, blueish tone. And the paint guy at the store made it seem like what we "get" if we choose the metallic color, is just that color in two different bases: one semi-gloss, and one metallic. In hindsight, it seems like since we came to him with two swatches (the metallic, lighter one and a non-metallic, slightly darker one), he could have just tinted the semi-gloss color a bit darker, or the metallic a bit lighter, right? Like, you're supposed to be the paint master or whatever, can't you just add or subtract a few drops of color? Why does it have to be exactly what's on the card? Isn't color-matching a thing? How do you do that if you don't have the MAAAAGICAL card? 

     Ugh, sorry. I'm just a bit rankled about the whole thing looking back because it caused us so much trouble later. That's because when we went to swirl the metallic color on top of the base color, it just looked like a bad paint job, because the two colors weren't different enough to look intentional. Major bummer. In that picture up there, if you look veeeeery closely above that outlet, you... probably still won't see where we tried it out, because it really did just look like a poorly executed paint job.

     Our next effort was an attempt to salvage the original too dark (and semi-gloss, which means it had roller-marks urrrvrywhere) color. My mom had come across a glitter "top coat" that Disney makes, so we gave that a go, thinking maybe it would lighten the color a bit (or seem to, anyway, by throwing light around a little and distracting the eye) and disguise the roller marks. But....

     It didn't make the color seem any less blue, and it just added a different, somehow even more noticeable kind of roller marks where the glitter transferred to the wall more heavily at the beginning of the roll. In those small patches where the glitter had properly deposited, it was pretty, but it didn't solve any of the problems those walls were having. So the glitter option was out. 

     At this point, everyone was getting very frustrated and overwhelmed and we all just wanted to get SOMETHING tolerable on the walls sometime before the babies graduate high school. So it was time to go back to basics. We picked out a nice neutral silvery color that was similar to what the original color should have been, but erred on the side of going lighter this time, and stuck to a basic eggshell finish with no attempts at anything fancy like metallic. And after a few hours of elbow grease, the room ended up this color. 

     And it checks all the boxes that need checking: relaxing, pretty, gender-neutral, and not just boring white. There are still some ideas being thrown around, like stenciling some sparkly stars around the room for a hit of whimsy, but those are just ideas. It's a nice enough color as it is, so anything else would just be for funsies. 

     You can also see in this picture that the floors were redone! That I can take no credit for, as Jason and my dad knocked it out in a day like champs. It looks niiiiice, right? I love a nice dark hardwood floor. And that the first of the cribs is set up! Which can only mean that this nursery is finally taking shape. But there's still a lot more to be done, so be sure to check back now and again to see how it's coming along!

Sounds like wings!

If you don't picture itty bitty wee baby 11 year old Harry Potter saying that, I just...I dunno about you. 

     Today I started work on a mobile for the Harry Potter nursery. You may have seen a winged-key mobile floating around on Pinterest for a while, if you've hopped on the bandwagon and started mainlining craft projects and cake recipes and other assorted Pinterest-cultivated heroin. I'll pop the picture in here, but I can't seem to find the original source, since the pins all link back to a non-existent blog or various tumblr pages.

 

     But I envisioned my version of this being a little lighter, brighter, and more attractive to baby eyeballs. Not to mention shinier. Babies love shiny things, I hear. Like little magpies, except babies aren't usually believed to be harbingers of doom/servants of Satan. Magpies, man. They get such a bad rep. To be fair, they do murder a lot of other birds, but mourn the death of one of their own with observable funereal habits, and if that doesn't say "Magpie supremacists plot takeover of entire bird kingdom" then I don't know what does. Anyway, keys. Here's my process: 

1. Gather supplies! Old keys (a lot of antique stores will have big boxes of keys that you can pick from, in case you don't have a bin of rusty old keys sitting around from your previous life as the warden of a Victorian insane asylum), wire, fabric glue, hot glue, and iridescent fabric.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Bend the wire into something roughly resembling a wing shape. This is a rather thin wire, just thick enough to hold the shape you give it, so I just used my hands. If you use a thicker gauge, you might need to bust out the pliers. I started off with something super simple, but plan to get more adventurous (double wings, pointed wings, butterfly style wings...). Make sure the wing style you choose fits well with the key you're working with. Or don't! It's Harry Potter, things don't have to make sense. Do what you feel, follow your heart, and so forth with the encouragement.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Next, glue the fabric to the wire using fabric glue. Just run some glue along the wire on one side, plop it down, hit the other side of the wire with some glue, and fold the fabric on top of it. Then set something reasonably heavy (a book or something, not like, your car) on top and let it dry for a while.
    

   

   Thanks mom for being my hand model!
   
   
   

4. Once it's all dry, just trim around the outside as closely as you like. I left a little bit of room because I like the idea of the fabric fraying a bit and making a really soft, time-worn look. But if you're into precision, you could cut close to the wire with an x-acto knife. Then a blob of hot glue will keep the wings attached to the keys, and you're done!
     
   
   
   
   

     I wish I could accurately capture how pretty the colors in the fabric are in movement. They catch the light and turn blue and pink and purple depending on the angle. It's pretty! I'll definitely post some pictures when I've made some more and put them all together on the mobile. I think it's going to turn out really nice!