Frame-worthy

After taking on the curtains, I had found a few cute ideas to bring color onto the walls via Pinterest. I finally settled on the frame idea, thinking I could go garage sale hunting and find some cheap frames and paint them our nursery colors. Well, it turns out when you’re looking for something specific at a garage sale; you’re not likely to find it.

Luckily one of those “looking” weekends we were driving around and I saw Aaron Brothers was having a buy one get one for one cent sale, and we stopped in. Boy were we excited when we walked in and saw an even better sale going one which was the buy one get TWO FREE! We ended up finding a set of 5, gorgeous decorative white frames with hooks and all (normally $50) and we bought two of them along with another gorgeous frame we decided to keep for ourselves and ended up with 10 frames of varying sizes for our wall all for $50!

Here’s an e-bay picture of what the frames looked like in the box, but in the pictures below you’ll see the detail of the frames truly pop!

Second thing I did after finding the frames was rummage through my house and try to find different shades of our nursery color. This was really great because I didn't have to buy any paint!

**Note: after painting all the blue frames I was a little frustrated with how many coats it took and opted to buy a brighter spray paint orange color for the bigger, more decorative frames.**  

After all was said and done, it took about two weeks to get the frames ready to hang on the wall. I ended up buying a clear spray paint to seal the rest of the frames and give them a glossy look – so the whole process was a little more time consuming than I wanted, but the results were great!

Here are some pictures of the painting process, drying and the results:

When it came to hanging the pictures, we picked the big turquoise one for the middle, to hold our beautiful elephant head and then winged it from there. Originally, I was hoping for different shaped frames and since we weren't able to do that, I wanted to add ribbon to give some of the frames a little more dimension. It actually proved a lot harder than they make it look on Pinterest and in the stores. Here’s how our framed wall turned out:

We found this cute little guy and couldn't resist plopping him on our fun rocker!

What do you think of our nursery so far?

Nursery Curtains

Nursery so far, after curtains & new 2" blinds!

While I’m still working on the nursery, I’m falling very behind on my posts so my second big nursery project was the curtains. After many failed attempts to find my idea of the perfect nursery curtains, I decided it couldn’t be that hard to make them … after all I do have a sewing machine and some creative energy to burn.

Since I’d never made curtains before, I started by googling and doing my research on Pinterest. I searched: how to make easy lined curtains –To my surprise I ran across the easiest post from my pastor’s wife, Robie! Not only was it easy to follow, but she added a cute trim that I had never seen before and really brought my colors together.

My idea was even though it’s a nursery the curtains should feel fun but be able to grow with our child so I didn’t want something too “baby”ish. Not to mention, it’s very hard to find our color combination and have it work for a gender neutral nursery. So I set off to a fabric store with my mom one day and we picked a few fabrics we really loved. You can see them in the pictures below:

We thought in the end, this looked a little too feminine

We ended up deciding on the second fabric down.

This was our runner up, as you can see..it's quite beautiful as well.

They were all beautiful, but the orange with white and brown seemed too girly, and once we matched the other fabric against our rug and crib, it was obvious our choice had to be the blue and gray. I also ran with Robie’s idea of adding the trim and that would help me bring in the orange.

It wasn’t all that difficult, but I did need to dust off the sewing machine and re-learn it. If you look close enough, you can see the stitching isn’t exactly perfect or perfectly straight, but they were definitely made with LOVE!

I personally think they turned out great. In all, they took a week. I left room at the top of the curtain to be able to fit in the rod, but I really loved the clean look of the hooks and so I ended up buying 2 packs of those clip-hooks to hang the curtains and voila!  If you're looking for a step-by-step guide to creating your own curtains, I highly suggest checking out Robbie's post here!

Check out more pictures of the curtains below: