Modern Baby Boy Quilt

modern baby quilt

Remember the bunting I made recently? Well here is the matching bedding! Inspired by this gorgeous quilt that Holly from Bijou Lovely made for her friend Kelly, who came up with the design. I made up the dimensions myself as Holly hasn’t posted a tutorial or a pattern on it yet (but I think she plans too). I loved its simplicity and fortunately its simplicity made it easy to figure out a block size that suited our fabric choices.

Modern Baby Quilt Front

Modern Baby Quilt Back

When I found out the plan for the baby’s room was aqua/turquoise kind of tones I knew that the Backyard Baby fabric range would be perfect. I got my friend to choose her favourites from there and I added to those with complimentary soilds, dots and stripes from Spotlight.

windy day, backyard baby

I love this windy day one and its little heart carved into the tree trunk and eggs in the nest in the tree branches, oh and the birds with scarves! cute cute cute.

dots, backyard baby

how sweet are the acorns inside some of these dots?!

birch forrest, backyard baby

The beauty of birch trees aside, those little orange caps on the woodpeckers head! sweet!

Put all the fabrics together and I think it creates quite a nice modern baby boy colour pallet.

all together – a modern baby boy pallet

I also put together a new bassinet mattress and some fitted sheets. I just bought extra of some of the stripe fabric because it was the softest cotton I’ve felt in a long time. Like a brushed cotton or something. Perfect for bubs to rest his sweet little head. If you need to make your own bassinet bedding, because lets face it, its almost impossible to buy, you can! Its very easy.

Just take your mattress (I got this one cut at Clarke Rubber using the old mattress as a template) place it on top of your fabric. Trace its outline.

Measure the depth of your mattress, add 2.5cm to this. Now redraw your shape you just traced onto the fabric but keep this distance away from your original line. ie. if your mattress plus your seam allowance is 7.5cm, draw your shape 7.5cm larger all the way around. Cut it out. Measure the perimeter of the edge of your fabric, three quaters of this distance will be your elastic length. Sew a casing seam all the way around and thread it with thin elastic about 5mm x 3/4 the perimeter of your original edge. Stitch to secure. Done! Now make a couple, because you know babies, they aren’t all softness and sweet smelling. Spew and poop. Yep.

from underneath – bassinet mattress and fitted sheet

goes beautifully with the quilt

I hope his quilt is a place for playing and for snuggles for many years!

baby quilt – made with love.

Japanese Bubble Skirt

A little friend of ours is turning 5! Currently this sweet little number is winging its way to her house.

Japanese Bubble Skirt

Its a really simple cute as a button pattern from this Japanese kids clothing book.

Japanese Pattern Book

I actually had a few issues with the pattern itself. Well I think that was the problem. If my guessing at what the Japanese means is right (and its probably not) some of the measurements are way out. In the end I took the general idea of the skirt and made most of it up. I really hope it fits!! I think it will be the perfect little skirt to jump around in with leggings and boots in the change of season that she’s about to experience.

Cute Little Bows

The skirt sports cute little bow ties at the bottom which gives it its bouncy look.

French Seams

And the pattern calls for french seams which I think really finish off this simple skirt beautifully.

Japanese Bubble Skirt

and this is me making my oldest try it on so I felt like I was at least close to the right size seeing I fiddled with it so much. I actually think it should sit a little shorter so hopefully it’ll fit perfect!

Crayon Super Star

Crayon Stars

I’ve been coming up with little projects to do with my youngest whilst Big Sister is at Kindy.

stubby crayons - time for a new look

I’ve been meaning to try out melting left-over crayons into new shapes for a while now. We finally gave it a go. I quickly browsed the net for ‘recipies’ but it appears a bit hit and miss. So I started with good ol Martha and went from there.

score the wrapper

A few people on the net suggested using a stanley to score the crayons to get the wrappers off… good tip. My good tip is then give it to one with itty bitty fingers and let her go to town.

little fingers unwrap crayons well

Once you’ve got all the crayons unwrapped break them into small pieces and then use them as a colour sort activity. We had a heap of fun with this part!

a great tool for teaching colour theory

then put your crayon bits into a container. I just used an old ikea ice tray.

Pretty sure you cant do this more than a few times with the same tray, and I’d be real careful, but it worked for us. I threw it out after (I think they only cost $1.)

You can group your colours together or mix them up. Some of my favourites were the ones where we blended complimentary colours.

place broken crayons in container

I then placed it on a baking tray lined with baking paper, just in case it all went pear shaped! Then it went in the oven.

wait patiently...

Don’t worry, our oven is cool touch. Martha suggests 10-15minutes at 150C but I found that 5minutes melted them just fine. (I was being really careful not to over heat the ice cube tray too.)

melted crayon

melted crayon is all glossy and almost clear looking. Allow it to cool to opaque. I also put ours in the freezer for about 20minutes, I read it helped pop them out. Now this is the part where I tell you the stars work quite well but I think a more solid shape, like a heart, would be easier to pop out. Some of the points on a few of the stars cracked off as they were quite difficult to pop out. Still we got some great stars with interesting colours and fun new crayons to draw with. Here are a couple of my favourites:

star wars star!

Doesn’t this make you think of space? You could make them as party gifts for a star-wars party!

motley

I’m always a fan of anything with a bit of yellow!

pretty blue

You can see this was one of the ones where a point got cracked off. It was so pretty though.

And for the ultimate test….

They draw great!

wait for big sister to come home and surprise her with a fun present, then get drawing!

Re-upholstered Verge Find

bar stool rescue

The week we first moved into our house there was a verge collection. On one of his 6billion-Super-Awesome-help-us-move-trailer-trips my Dad found 3 bar stools on the side of the road. They used to look like this:

Bar stool - roadside find

They were actually worse than this, legs and support bars had fallen off completely, but it was all glued back together by my hubby and Dad before I could blink.

We had never had a breakfast bar before and so we didn’t own any stools. I think the boys were so tired from all the moving they were dying for somewhere to sit. Poor things had to glue their own stools!

Well, they stayed like this for quite some time, secure but not pretty.

new foam - Clarke Rubber, Fabric - Ikea

Finally sick of the dogy look of them I resolved to redo them.

I’m trying to have some pops of yellow in my kitchen for a bit of happiness and fun and thought the bar stools would be a good place to ‘pop some yellow!’

I found some yellow and grey stripe fabric at ikea, could it be more perfect, or better priced? Plus it ties into my grey bench tops perfectly. I then resisited the urge to spray paint the legs yellow and got some white spray paint.  I finally went to Clarke Rubber and got them to cut some new foam to size for the top.

Then I snapped my fingers (hahahah)…ok I fought with my nail gun, sewed up a storm and several sheets of sandpaper and cans of spray paint later….

Ta Da…..

Yellow and white upholstered kitchen bar stools

refinished yellow and white bar stools

I’m loving how happy they are and how comfy the new cushions are! I wish I’d bought more of that fabric though, there’s none left at my ikea!

Yellow in the kitchen

Simple Dress Request

Now that my oldest is a kindergarten I often get to go to the fabric store with just one child in tow. Which is sometimes easier and sometimes not.

On our last trip she did not want to be in the trolley, so I let her wander around looking at all the fabric. (normally when there is two of them doing this its more like a crazy game of hide and seek, with me telling them off every 5 seconds…. yeah go on judge me, before I actually had kids I would have judged me too!) With a little more focus than usual, she was taking time to actually look at the fabric rather than hide behind it.

After I caught up with her I found her stroking some baby whale with Lots of Colourful little birdies all over it. Looking up at me with her big eyes she said ‘Mama make me a dress?’ Not really in love with the fabric but totally in love with the request I suggested a couple of other fabrics near by, but boy was she adamant. That was the one she wanted. As we were lining up to buy a meter she also requested a little squashy ducky to go with her dress. I drew up a pretty simple A-line dress pattern and added a few fun details and its not too bad!

I haven’t got the softie done yet, which she’s pretty dissapointed about but I do have the dress. She’s loving it, its actually hard to talk her into wearing anything else. So whilst its not my favourite thing ever her love for it and her involvement in it makes it one of the best projects I’ve ever done.