From pumpkin to carriage - part one: executive decisions are made

In April our first born is expected to make her way into this world. Since neither of us have made deals with Rumpelstiltskin in the past, we are going to end up keeping her and are tasked with creating room for her in our home. After careful deliberation we picked the bedroom that is to be her nursery (For those of you, like me, who are curious about where that word came from: c.1400, "breeding, nursing," from Old French norture, norreture "food, nourishment; education, training," from Late Latin nutritia "a nursing, suckling," from Latin nutrire "to nourish, suckle").

Here it is:

It is ugly. It has a carpet the colour of phlegm. The walls are a grey-blue colour intended to encourage one to seriously consider slitting one's wrists. But look beyond that. See the potential. The room overlooks our back yard, which is very pretty. It is a nice size. Oh, and it has a Harry Potter closet (top left photo - the door behind the entrance to the room is the closet. The door to the right of that is the Harry Potter closet. It is this weird little room in the wall, about 3.5 feet deep, 3 feet wide and about 5 feet high. The door to this little room has no handle. The reason for it's existence remains a mystery).

We needed a plan of action. A grand vision. We were the fairy godmothers and with or without a wand (well, to be realistic, without a wand and with a lot of sweaty labour) we were going to convert this room from a pumpkin to a carriage of the bejeweled variety.

Here is the high level plan we came up with

• We will paint the walls. One wall shall be painted an accent colour.
• Chalkboard paint shall make an appearance somewhere in the room.
• We will have new non-bodily fluid coloured carpet put down.
• There shall, of course, be curtains.
• There shall, and now we start to get truly ambitious, be a mural.
• We could do with some switch plates. Plates that don't look older than my grandparents would be nice.
• The closet would need more than one rod. An organization system of some sort would need to be procured.

 I leave you here for now. In my imagination you are seated at the edge of your couch, biting on your fingernails, agog with anticipation, waiting, wanting to know how it all turned out. I'll keep you posted.

Witchery and Curtains

Our home is plagued by ugly blinds. Every window has them - the white (plastic?), horizontal slats with the cords hanging down one side, cords that are in a perpetual state of knottitude. I've managed to live with these blinds for nearly a year and a half, but I never made my peace with them. Recently, when I was at Target I happened upon some cheap-ish curtains (not cheap, curtains are never cheap in the United States, are they?) and a reasonably priced curtain rod. I called THO and had him quickly measure the window in our guest bedroom. A short while after I traipsed in the front door with 4 curtains and associated hardware. THO humoured me and hung them up post haste while I stood around, hopping from foot to foot in eager anticipation. They looked lovely. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself.

That did it. I wanted curtains everywhere. Now, if I had a curtain budget of a few thousand dollars, this would be a piece of cake. I did not, so I set off to the mecca of those of us with modest budgets - Ikea. My goal was to transform our living room window from an Ugly Sister into Cinderella. Here is the before pic, taken in poor lighting to make it appear even worse than in actually was:

Make a note of the aforementioned homely blinds. Also note the sad-sack skinny browny-grey curtain panel (there are two of them, one on either side of the blinds) that some well-intentioned, but possibly partially blind previous owner of my home had hung on either side of the blinds, ostensibly to improve aesthetics, but in reality serving only to highlight the ugliness.

Ikea did not disappoint, though one does wish that the unwashed masses did not pick the exact same time as one to procure their giant couches and shelving units. I found curtains that did not demand an arm, leg and first born in payment, but they were very long. This, to me, was an obstacle of insurmountable proportions. I can't sew. I stood around the curtain area, despondent, possibly looking like even more of a sad sack than did my skinny brown curtain panels back home. Bobbing around my sea of sadness, I reached for the one raft of hope, the internet. I entered, rather hopelessly, 'no sew curtains' and behold! these were a real thing. What I needed was apparently something called 'Stitch Witchery. I love the internet. I headed home with a dual curtain rod (ooh fancy) and six curtain panels.

I procured the stitch witchery from Michaels, and then let everything sit around for about a week while I got over my fear of ruining the panels and/or burning my fingers with a hot iron. This tutorial from the Young House Love blog helped boost my confidence. When I was once more the master of my emotions, I got started.

It was really pretty easy. THO hung up one of the curtain panels for me from the existing sad sack rod. I marked how long I wanted the curtain to be. Folded it to the mark and measured it out on the tape. Heated up the iron. The stitch witchery is a roll of thin, wispy white tape. It isn't sticky at all. I placed it in the fold of the curtain, ironed over it with a steam iron and ta-da my curtain was hemmed. The heat dissolves the witchery tape into something gooey that bonds fabric. Truly magical stuff. My ironing board isn't as long as my curtains were wide, so as I went along I used the marked out length on my tape to make sure I wasn't going crooked. The only thing to be careful about is do not, DO NOT, get any of the stitch witchery tape on the iron. I touched an edge by mistake and then had to spend 15 minutes scrubbing the goop off the bottom of the iron. Nail polish remover helped. Each panel took me between 10 and 15 minutes to 'hem'. Most of this time was spent making sure my fold was straight and re-measuring it about eleven thousand times. Oh and I spilled a pool of water on one of the panels from my iron. I held the iron sideways for a bit while I briefly day dreamed. Ten thumbs remember?

THO got the rods up the next day with just the right amount of cursing. Now for the big reveal:

One last thing. In my moment of euphoria at Ikea, when I discovered witchery, I may have gone a tad overboard. I didn't just buy curtains. I bought fabric. Yards of it. We're putting together the nursery for our baby due in April and in that moment I decided that I would make her curtains. But that is going to be a whole other story.

Vows and 3D art

We wrote our own vows for our wedding and the vows were one of my favourite parts of our wedding (along with the beach, and my husband singing, and the salt ceremony, and my father singing and the dancing, and the toasts, oh and the food, and the cake was yummy - actually I loved it all). Post-wedding I kept taking sneak peeks at the email that contained the text of my husband's vows, and on occasion, I'll admit it, at my own too. So, it seemed like a good idea to have our vows displayed in our bedroom so that I could re-read them and gloat whenever I wanted (and, of course,  point to particular lines during a fight and say a-ha, that is not what you promised).

First I attempted to find someone else who I could pay to do the job for me. I really liked the Geezees Etsy store, but the prices are rather steep. Also, the more I thought about it, the keener I became to have the vows displayed in our own handwriting - spidery and ugly though that might be compared to all the pretty fonts out there.

My second idea was to write up our vows, take photos of them, have the photos printed out and framed.

Then, I happened upon the Umbra 3D wallflower art and, for reasons I cannot explain, it became imperative that these flowers participated in the vow related art project. So, I ordered them and Amazon had them waiting at my doorstep the next day.

While I was waiting (a whole day and half!) for the flowers to arrive, it seemed like a good idea to get the vows ready to hang. I decided that I did not have the patience to wait for photos to be printed, and that I did not want to shop for frames. I actually did not want to shop at all because a) I was feeling lazy and b) It was cold and rainy out. So I dug through my meager supplies at home and found that I had two 8*10 canvases, stretched on wood frames just lying around, begging to be used. Twenty minutes later I had two canvases ready - I used acrylic paint and a sponge brush. The soon-to-be-vow-wall is red and so I picked the yellowey-orangey background for the canvas.

Then it was go time - putting it all together. I laid out the flowers on the carpet and fidgeted with them for a bit. I added the two canvases, and then called upon THO for his aesthetic input. He fidgeted with the flowers till they were just so and then I had to get them on to the wall. For the most part this turned out to be much easier than I expected. As I moved each piece (canvas or flower) from the floor to the wall, I marked it's position on the floor with a push pin. That way I could measure the distance between push pins on the floor, measure the same distance on the wall, and reproduce the pattern. Here is what the floor looked like, with a mix of pins, flowers and canvas:

and this is the wall taking shape:

The flowers attach to the wall with little round bits of adhesive tape (included in the box). Three of the flowers drove me insane. The moment I took my eyes off them they would fall right off and lie around innocently on the floor as if they had no idea how they got there. This got disheartening after a bit, but I come from hardy stock and my middle name is keep-at-it-with-bloody-minded-determination, so I ended up winning that battle. For now. The trust is broken though; I eye the flowers with grim suspicion every time I go past that wall.
This is what it looked like with all the flowers and both canvases up on the wall:

All that remained was to write our vows. My vows in their entirety were too long to fit, so I had to extract a modest selection of text. We used black sharpies, added one more crucial flower to the wall and voila: