New and Improved

I made made this little cork board for Ryleigh's room ages ago.

It's cute with her name on it and stuff, but I was never really happy with it. The major issue was that I chose that lavender fabric that is pretty much the exact same color as her walls. Well, duh...

So, last weekend I finally got my butt in gear and went to my fave nearby Joann Fabric store and got some new fabric to cover it.

 And Ta-da!!

With better spots for all her bows. 

Yay! I think it turned out really great! And it's a definite improvement over that drab, boring version from before.

*Looking at these pics I noticed that the letters were a little crooked. Luckily I put them on in such a way that they can be moved, so I was able to straighten them up. :-)

I think I may be the worst blogger ever. But, things are getting pretty pregnant up in here and tiredness usually wins out over blogging. My apologies to my millions of readers.

We've finally started to get things together for baby girl. About time, since she'll be here in less than two weeks! Eeeekkkkk! I can't believe it!

We got the carpet cleaned in our house. After weeks and weeks of scouring Craigslist and a couple trips to used furniture stores looking for a dresser for baby's room we had some luck and found something. Living in a neighborhood full of college students sometimes has it's perks. The last few weeks have been the move in/move out time on our street. In the matter of one weekend we managed to snag a couple of dressers that were being left behind. For FREE! Who doesn't love freebies? And with a little TLC we knew they had some potential.

We found this one we thought would be perfect for baby's room:

 

It really is just kind of crappy laminate and isn't in the greatest shape. But the price was right. And with a little paint and some new drawer pulls, Ron was able to turn it into this:

Yay! It looks pretty great if we do say so ourselves. Who knew my hubby was so handy? Now we're going to put our changing pad on the top and we'll be ready to go. I started getting baby's clothes washed now that we have a place to put them. I'm getting excited to meet our little baby girl!

I'll get a new post up soon with other baby updates.

Fun Project

First, I just have to say that since bragging about how great I was feeling in the last blog post, pregnancy karma has come back to bite me in the ass and remind me to stay humble. Please forgive me, I won't let it happen again. ;-)

Our baby doesn't have her own room or even a crib, but I've still been working on some crafty projects to decorate her future room.

A few weeks back I snagged this frame from the free box at a friends' garage sale.

 

Some of the paint was peeling off the sides of the frame, but I could see it had some potential. 

I really want to do a cluster of white frames in baby girl's room. I saw this idea on Pinterest, the place where a lot of ideas come from these days. The woman took paint sample cards and a craft punch to make some pretty cool framed "art" for super cheap. 

Here's my version:

(Please pardon the poor lighting in most of these photos)

I started out by spray painting the frame white...I didn't take any pics of that part though. Then I picked up some paint sample cards at Walmart that I thought would coordinate with baby's bedding. And punched out the butterflies with my handy dandy Martha Stewart craft punch.

I went to Hobby Lobby to see about cutting some new mats for the frame, unfortunately it was going to cost $20 for new mats. Since I was trying to keep this little project cheap, I decided to try an alternative method using the mats already in the frame.

 

I figured if it didn't work out I could always go get the custom mats cut. I bought some scrapbook paper to cut and glue to the existing mats.

Since this mat was going underneath it didn't matter if some of the gold showed on the edge.

I used some sticky tabs for scrapbooking to attach the butterflies.

Then I put the whole thing in the newly painted frame and: Ta da!

It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. All for less than $10, including the spray paint. 

Now to get a bedroom ready for this baby...

Sunday, Crafty Sunday

Maybe it's some sort of nesting thing, but I have a ton of ideas for fun projects I'd like to work on. It might also be  the blogs I've been reading or my obsession with pinterest.com. The internet is a seemingly endless abyss of ideas and pretty things. Well, on pinterest you can create virtual pinboards to save pics of all the  wonderful things that inspire you. Remember when your mom used to save pages and photos out of home decorating magazines? It's kind of like that, without the hassle of actual pages to save. I have been delving into the world of online craftiness and getting a lot of ideas. But first things first. Many many weeks ago I took on the task of sewing a table runner for our friends Christy and Matt. Christy and I went shopping and found this great sunshiney yellow print.

Well, weeks have gone by and life has been happening. But I finally got some time to work on what should have been an easy little project (note the word should). Perhaps it is because I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to these things. Or perhaps it is the fact that I never use any patterns or instructions and tend to just wing it when it comes to sewing. Or it could just be my baby brain. But for some reason this little table runner proved to bee more difficult than it needed to be. After some seam ripping and maybe a little swearing I am happy to say it is finis.

 

Yay! It will definitely look better on their dark wood table than it does on mine. I think it turned out pretty well. Hopefully the Pourneys will see the flaws and imperfections as part of the charm of being handmade.


Like I said, I have some other projects in the works today. I snagged this frame out of the Goodwill box of  leftovers from Christy & Matt's garage sale this weekend. (Thanks Carin!) That is about as close to dumpster diving as it gets for this girl.

I have a great idea for this little frame, something fun for Baby Rowe's room. But, since we are traveling to Indiana next weekend it may be a couple weeks before I get to post the finished product. The suspense is already killing you, I'm sure.