Minion Nursery Complete!

Well folks, with just one week to D-day (AKA My due date) the count down is nearing completion. Luckily for me the nursery project has already  been completed. Mr. Mayhem and I had fun using our new camera (our biggest baby splurge!) to take some nice photos of our hard work. 

We are so happy with how everything came together. It really puts a new mama's heart at ease to know that she has a safe, calming, and comfortable place to bring her newborn home to. 

This first photo is the view as you come in the door. The crib is to the right and the closet is to the left. 

Mr. Mayhem decided that the baby and I needed to be included in the photo shoot. I think this angle gives a good idea of the layout of the room. Remember this first nursery post where I was hell bent on changing the rug? Surprise...it ended up working, and I love it in the space. Amazing how things just work out some times.

Here is the view of the other side of the room. His bed looks so empty, but from what I have read that is the safest way for baby to sleep.  That bear on the crib makes heart beat sounds to sooth the little guy to sleep with reminiscent sounds of the womb.

We opted for a mesh bumper because we have heard concerns about babies being suffocated by the regular kind! I love the crisp white look too. It keeps it simple.

 Let's take a look at some more of the details!  You might remember this little minion from this post and the growth chart ruler from this post! They both add so much fun and interest to the space.

Mr. Mayhem built these shelves from corbels we bought at the home improvement store and some wood we found in the basement left from the previous owners. They turned out great especially considering their humble beginnings. 

Baby Mayhem's first photo got framed and put on the shelf with a little minion friend. My mom bought that minion for us not realizing that it was a Dracula minion with a cape and FANGS! I cut off the cape, but those fangs are still there and crack me up. My mom was so embarrassed when she realized in was a vampire.

We are especially excited about our new rocker glider that we got as a gift (we are so thankful for all the generous people around us!). It is so comfy and will be great to rock the little one in.  Mr. Mayhem built those book shelves on the wall as well. They are knock offs of these Ikea picture ledges. The pillow I sewed, and then Mr. Mayhem and I used this method to paint on the minions.

Like I said, the nursery is done, but that doesn't mean I don't have more ideas for the future. I think once the baby is born and we have announced his name, I will buy the letters to spell it out and intersperse them with these minions on the top shelf.  I may paint them or decoupage them with cute craft paper. You will just have to wait and see! I love the little bit of the cornice box that you can see in this picture!

Now all it needs is a baby! I will let you know when that addition happens. Any day now!

DIY Cornice Box

I'm generally a girl who knows what she wants and sets out to get it. This project is an example of that. I wanted grey and yellow chevron cornice boxes for my nursery and no one was going to tell me "No". It didn't seem like an unrealistic request at the time. Mr. Mayhem whipped up the boxes, and I covered them with batting, but then we hit a snag. I could not find a yellow and grey chevron fabric that I liked. I finally decided to settle for plain yellow chevron. I ordered it from fabric.com, and I love the fabric. It was nice, but the wrong shade of yellow for the nursery. Too mustard. Nice, but not right. Then, I decided to settle again and go for grey chevron. It would be an easier color to match/coordinate with the room.  I found the perfect grey chevron fabric here in town at Hobby Lobby! I decided to wait to buy it until my mom was in town and she could help me finish the cornice boxes. Low and behold, when we went to get the fabric, they were sold out and the warehouse was out of stock as well...sad day. But then standing amongst the crafting supplies lamenting my decision not to buy the fabric the week before when it was it stock, an idea hit me. Paint your own chevron pattern. My mom looked at me like I had a screw loose (I probably do), but she helped me pick out white fabric, acrylic paint, and textile medium. When I got home and announced to Mr. Mayhem what I was planning to do, he rolled his eyes, then rolled up his sleeves to help me. He's a good man.

First, I washed and dried the fabric. Then I cut it to fit the previously constructed boxes. 

 

This is not really a step in the process, but I like this 3 4 generations photo. My grandma is working a crossword puzzle, my mom is hemming my maternity pants, I'm ironing the fabric, and the baby is just hanging out (probably having the hiccups. They are his favorite way to pester mom :-))

Then the complicated part started. We had to measure and do math...blah! Luckily Mr. Mayhem did most of the figuring. We decided we wanted 5 in. chevrons and each chevron would be 3/4 in. wide. We decided 3/4 because that was the width of our tape. We went along the fabric pinning each place the tip of a chevron would be using a measuring tape.

 

As you can see, we used a lot of pins. Then, we used frog tape to tape between the pins and reveal our chevron pattern.

I'm not going to lie. It took forever. Especially since we had two pieces of fabric to do.

This is what it looked like when all the tape was applied. I would wholeheartedly recommend frog tape. It is easy to work with and provides a great seal--even on fabric. I had never tried it on fabric before.

Then, I painted my pattern. Two yellow stripes, one grey stripe. I used Anita's acrylic craft paint mixed 2 parts paint, one part textile medium.

We let it dry a little, but not all the way, then we carefully peeled off the tape.

This is what we were left with. Perfect chevron fabric, in the perfect colors for the nursery. Lots of work, but worth it. The rest of the project went as smoothly as planned.

Let's back up a bit to the construction of the boxes. It is really fairly simple. We bought a piece of 10"x 1/2" pine. I don't remember the length, but it is not really important because you would need to get the right size for your window anyway. We made them to extend just a few inches passed the window trim and jut out from the wall 4". 

We drilled and counter sunk three screws on each corner. 

We also attached some L brackets to hang them with. Pine is a really good wood for this project because it is very light.

Now that we had the fabric and the boxes finished, we were ready to put it all together. We simply stapled batting then the fabric around the boxes. We were careful to pull the corners tight and make sure everything was straight and wrinkle free.

Then we hung them up! I love them! What a great touch of color and fun to our little guys nursery. This is a good picture to see how far out they jut from the wall. We picked 4" in case we ever want to add curtains underneath. We would need 4" for a curtain rod.

The other window.

Just a few more touches and the nursery will be all set for little Mayhem's arrival! Can't wait!

Freezer Paper Painting--Minion Pillow

Hello blog friends! We have been making quite a bit of progress putting together our minion nursery for our little guy. I'm 35 weeks pregnant, so it's about time to wrap things up. We hope to finish hanging some shelves and order a chair this week. Once those are in place, I will give you the grand tour, but for now I want to share a fun project the Mr. and I worked on yesterday. We made this pillow!

The technique is called freezer paper painting. I found a nice tutorial of it on this blog.  We finished our project, and Mr. Mayhem looked at me and said, "When do we put it in the freezer?" So I will take this opportunity to point out that you will not actually use the freezer, just freezer paper. ;-)

As you may or may not know there is no minion fabric in existence. Hence, the need to create my own. I started with plain white canvas/denim type fabric. I sewed a pillow case to fit my pillow form. I am probably the most amateur sewer on the planet, so I did not create a tutorial for that. I'm sure there are lots of good ones out there if you need it. 

We started with a minion image from the interweb. Mr. Mayhem worked his computer magic to simplify it into something we could cut out. Then we placed freezer paper over it and carefully cut around the design with a sharp razor blade knife. 

In case you don't know what freezer paper is. (Mr. Mayhem didn't) It is in the ziplock bag aisle at Wal-Mart. 

 

I didn't get any pictures of the cutting process, but this is what we were left with. It is important to remember that you want to remove the black part, not the white part. You are creating a stencil.

Once we had our images cut out we ironed them on to the pre-washed pillow cover that I had sewn.  Put some sort of fabric between the paper and the iron. We used an old pillow case. I would also like to stress here: DO NOT USE STEAM!!! It must be a dry iron or your paper will be wrinkly and not provide a good seal. We experienced this. Pictures to follow.

 Once the image is adhered to the fabric you are ready to paint. There are two options for paint. 1)Buy fabric paint. 2) (what I did) Use regular acrylic craft paint with some textile medium mixed in. Either way you will be able to wash your project with out the paint washing off. I used Anita's textile medium and paints.

You simply mix in 2 parts paint to 1 part medium. Easy. It does make the paint a little bit more runny than with out it, but we didn't have a problem.

Carefully paint inside the stencil. I painted this minion because it was ironed correctly and therefore easy to paint.

Mr. Mayhem painted this minion because it was the one that we had used steam on. You can see how wrinkly it was. He carefully painted to make sure no paint seeped under the stencil.

Good work, honey!

 After we finished painting yellow, we decided that we didn't like it. It was too close to the white, and we didn't think it would stand out enough. Luckily we hadn't removed the stencils yet, so we just painted over it with grey paint mixed with the textile medium.

When the paint was dry, we carefully peeled away the freezer paper. We were left with our cute design! 

 Here it is in the current nursery chair. We will hopefully be swapping it for a glider rocker this week or next.  I love how the pillow turned out. It is simple, but cute and special. It really coordinates with everything in the room and does a nice job bringing the theme to this corner.

To catch up on other nursery projects so far go here, here, and here.

Minion Nursery Update

Mr. Mayhem and I have been busy this past month getting things going in the nursery. We still have plenty of time before the bambino makes his appearance in November, but Mr. Mayhem's sister was coming for a visit at the end of July and we wanted her help painting the minion murals. So we had to get the office furniture out and the wall painted before her arrival. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of the before with furniture, but here is the room pre-paint.

 As you can see the room was not horrible, but the colors were needing some updating and they definitely did not go with the minion theme.

Painting day was actually wonderful for me. My parents were in town. My mom took me maternity clothes shopping while my dad and Mr. Mayhem painted the whole room!

The color we chose was called Cloudy Day by color place. That's right...Wal-Mart paint. It works and it is cheap! We painted the trim with Dutch Boy Ultra White platinum in semi gloss. There is a definite difference between the quality of the two paints, and we felt it was worth the splurge for the trim, but the Wal-Mart paint worked just fine for the walls. One advantage to the Dutch Boy Paltinum paint is that it is low odor and no VOC. So even this preggo woman could get in on the fun. My job was painting the doors, outside in the well ventilated garage.

I neglected to take pictures between the wall/trim painting and the minion painting. This is the only shot of the walls without a minion...We toyed with the idea of not painting the trim (it is time consuming, annoying, we're lazy), but we are sooooo glad we did. It really adds a lot to the room. 

Without further ado the awesome murals painted by my sister-in-law with the help of my husband.
Let me remind you that these are not decals. They are hand painted! 

Minion Mural

I will admit I was a little worried how they would turn out. I think it was because I was picturing how it would look if I tried to paint them....Luckily SIL is a MUCH better painter than I am. They used color place wall paint and artist brushes to complete the murals.

Here are some in progress pictures of the minions. They started by using a projector to project the image on the wall and traced around it. Then they turned off the projector and started filling in the solid colors. The last and most technical part was SIL shading and blending to make them images 3D.

Mr. Mayhem painted so much he hurt his wrist! You can see the ace bandage in the pictures. Luckily he is recovering and even started a new painting project over the weekend. I'll have updates when it's finished.

The other fun update that we added to the nursery is the crib. Last Saturday some good friends of ours stopped over to drop it off. We were so surprised and grateful for their generosity! Here's Mr. Mayhem putting it together.

Our Cat, General Tso, likes to be a part of everything we are doing. Mr. Mayhem assembled the crib while I read the directions and stopped the cat from eating the Styrofoam packaging!

Can you spot the kitty?

 It is really starting to look like a nursery! I can't wait for the little guy to get here so he can enjoy the space.  Obviously we need to do a bit more before his arrival. Like buy a crib mattress...

When we first started on the nursery, my thought was, "that rug is going to have to go," but now I kind of like it. It works well with the yellow, blue, and grey. It is still there on a trial period. I might swap it out...What do you think? Keep it or keep looking?