nursery decor

In this blog post from June I explained the rag rug I was making for Baby G's room.  It's finished now and so are a few other DIY items we made for her nursery.  When I was pinning things to my Baby G Pinterest board I found about $200 worth of Etsy items I wanted for her nursery.  Then I realized I could make most of them.  So this is my Etsy rip-off blog.  My apologies to those merchants whose ideas I stole.  If I was rich I would have definitely paid them all to do the work for me.

Rag rug-
There's a longer explanation here but basically the rag rug is strips of material tied into a no-slip rug mat.  As I mentioned in my first blog about it, the woman whose instructions I used didn't tie the pieces.  I did because
1. I have a two year old who I could just picture pulling out the pieces one by one.
2. I thought it looked better.
Our rag rug ended up being 3 feet by about 4 1/2 feet.  I would guess that it took about 20 yards of fabric.  I ended up buying 22 all together but had some left over at the end.  This rug took a lot of time. I would cut about 100 strips at a time then be really surprised at how little of the mat they took up.  I probably used up about 3 weeks of nap times and night times doing this.  However, I love this rug and the look it gives to the nursery so I would definitely do it again.  It ended up costing about $100 in the end (fabric is expensive, who knew?), but the alternate area rug I was considering from Pottery Barn was over $400 so I guess it's a win.

Mobile-
This was an Etsy item and I have to say that this Etsy store has a wide variety of this type of mobile, with all different shapes, so it's definitely worth checking out.  M's dad used a wire hanger to make a hoop to start with.  I bought cheap ribbon and tied 1-2 inch pieces around the hoop.  Then I ordered die cut stars for relatively cheap from this Etsy store.  The owner was super nice and helpful in giving me the right number of each color that I needed.  I also wanted to include moons but couldn't find them anywhere and couldn't cut them free-handed, so it ended up being stars only.  The stars are glued back to back with clear fishing line through the middle.  I was initially worried that the fishing line wouldn't straighten out.  It had a curl when I cut it from the reel.  Once the stars were added it hung perfectly straight.  The hardest part was finding an empty mobile hanger (Amazon).

Moon and stars-
I take very little credit for this one because I sent the Etsy link for this one to M's dad and he bought the wood, made himself a stencil, and cut out the pieces.  I painted them with acrylic glitter paint.  Love these.

Framed quotes-
These are the easiest DIY pieces I did.  They're a book (Goodnight Moon) quote and a children's prayer typed in Photoshop and printed on card stock.  Idea came from a few stick on wall decals I found.  I'm not a huge fan of wall stickers so we went with frames.

I still have a few things I'm looking for ideas for.  A while back I made this lampshade for M's room and I've been searching for one for G's room without any luck so far.  Her room still has a ways to go.  Even though the picture below looks good the other side of the room is currently decorated with half-unpacked boxes and bins so this won't be the last "G's room post."  I hope these ideas are helpful to a few people because I love how this room is coming along.  Picture my yet-to-be-started lamp on the nightstand :)

rainbow snow

M loves the snow.  He's been outside to play it in a handful of times this year and tends to stay out as long as we'll let him, followed by screaming and crying when it's time to go in.  This morning when M saw the snow he was dying to get out into it and he wasn't too happy when the dogs went out without him.  Since I was not ready for a 9am romp in the snow we brought the snow inside to us and had some fun.

I filled a 9x13 glass casserole dish with snow.  It's great snowman snow and made snowballs very easily, which M loved.  I also got three small containers, filled the each with cold water and added a drop of food coloring to each.  I gave M a big mixing spoon and a cooking brush to "paint" with.

At first M was pretty surprised that the snow could change color.  Pretty soon he was painting and eventually dumping the water into the snow.

We used yellow, red, and blue water which worked well because it mixed into green, purple, and orange so at point we had a pretty good rainbow of colors going on...until it turned to a peach colored slush.

We made snowballs, a snowman, and built some towers that M enjoyed knocking over with the spoon. Eventually about half the snow had melted leaving a coating of water on the dish.  The snowballs that were left could easily slide and spin on the wet surface, which M really enjoyed too.  All in all it served it's purpose- pushing our journey outside back a few hours.