Quick Before I Get Sidetrack'd

Wow, we got quite a bit done this week (especially over the weekend)! I think I actually accomplished everything I intended to plus a few extras.

The big tackles for this week were Boo’s room, getting baby things from the attic, and finishing the burp cloth sewing project I started.

Let’s start with Boo’s room…

This is what the room looked like when we moved in two years ago:

During the two years we’ve lived here it has been used primarily for storage. When we found out we were expecting there were boxes piled everywhere, the closet was filled with miscellaneous stuff, and it was generally a pretty scary place (especially if you were looking for something specific). Over the last couple of months we’ve been hard at work cleaning out, decluttering (although we still have some to do), painting, and making it a bedroom again.

This weekend, Matt hung new closet doors, we moved the rest of the nursery furniture out of Little’s room and into Boo’s, and we put his shelf with his name letters on the wall. Over the last week I also got his clothes, the bedding, and all of the covers for carseat, swing, etc washed and dried.

Today it looks like this:

The burp cloth project…

Please do not look too closely at the pictures. I am a beginner teaching myself to sew, and this is my first start-to-finish completed project. I’m proud of the fact that I actually finished a project for once even though it is certainly far from perfect, and I’m pleased with the way the fabric/ribbon combinations turned out. When I got frustrated Matt kept reminding me that this was something that Boo was going to throw up on; he certainly won’t care if all the seams are perfect and the stitching straight.

I also finished my Spring cleaning and the cleaning I needed to do before company, wrote all of my Thank You’s (for birthday and baby gifts), and got my birth plan into my chart at the doctor’s office.

Up next – packing the hospital bag and installing the carseat. Nothing too strenuous this week, but definitely things that are important.

Good luck with your tackles!

I’ve mentioned before that I am not a crafty type of person. I would love to be able to sew, make pretty cards, smock dresses, etc. Some of these things I could probably figure out and do acceptably well if I would just take the time. However, my crafting tends to go as follows…

Little is having her 9-month pictures made today. She is going to wear either a white dress, a blue outfit, or a green dress. A while back I managed to lose both of her white hair bows. Because she has fine, baby hair the “alligator” clip type of barrettes work best; they are also the easiest to get in her hair.

I’m having trouble finding the clips at a price I’m willing to pay, so I decided to make some myself. We have some Gymboree clips that I like because both sides of the metal clip are covered with ribbon. The ribbon is sewn together at the sides to make a little pockets into which each side of clip slips. I set out a couple of weeks ago to round up the supplies and, finally, this week got everything together. Yesterday, when I got ready to make the first clip (a white one to wear for pictures today), I realized that the ribbon I have is too narrow to cover the clip and have room to sew a seam. What to do?

My options were to find wider ribbon or resort to gluing the ribbon in place. I was unable to quickly and efficiently locate wider ribbon yesterday afternoon. I bought a hot glue gun.

This morning around 4:30 (don’t ask why I was up; I really don’t know) I glued white ribbon onto a clip. It doesn’t exactly look professionally crafted, but it will definitely work for pictures!