Neverending projects

Have you ever seen something at a store or online and thought "I could make that myself for way cheaper!" yes, indeed this is a problem I have ALL. THE. TIME. Seriously, as soon as I start saying "ooh that's cute, but I bet I could make that myself...." There comes a look of sheer terror over my husband's face. I can't really blame him though, he has good reasons.

Point and case:

Four years ago I was pregnant for the first time. Among the aisles and aisles of gadgets and blankets and cutesy decor at the baby shops I didn't really know what I needed, so I sort of just copied my sister (who was also pregnant with her first just 2 months further along than me). She got a cute baby crib set, so I set out in search for one...not really paying attention to the fact I currently had no baby crib and wasn't planning on getting one immediately due to our living space constraints. No problem I thought, this would just give me more time to finish the set since I only started it a couple months before I was due. 

Well now my son is 3 3/4 years old and the crib set sits unfinished. Sigh. This isn't to say that I haven't spent countless hours working on it (I stopped counting once I got above 100 hours) but it is still so far from being finished. Part of that is my own forgetfulness and laziness, part is unknowingly picking a design that was way more of a time commitment than I planned, and partly was just too many other pressing matters (like moving across country 6 times, and ridiculous morning sickness) rising to the top of my priority list causing this to be put on the back burner. 

But without further ado I will show you the crib set I was trying to imitate:

Looking back I wish I'd chosen something different. Maybe it's just because I've been staring at the same unfinished pieces for 4 years now but I honestly don't love it like I used to (although I was never crazy about the bland faces an each monkey). But I refuse to throw in the towel. I've invested far too much time into this, and I have no better options at this point. And it's relatively gender neutral right? (i'm having a girl this time, so it better be)

The bulk of the work was finished about 3 years ago when I was able to finally find a cute monkey face to use as a template (thanks to a place mat I found at Target). Then I just had to trace and cut each piece and applique them onto each square. After, I did a tight zigzag stitch around each component of the face, and a spiral in the ear. 

Then I got hung up on how to fill in the faces. For a good year. I knew the best option would be to embroider the eyes, nose and mouth but unfortunately by this point I had no longer had access to an embroidery machine let alone have any idea as to how to do custom designs. 

So finally I gave in and decided to hand embroider all the faces. All 24 of them. First I drew the outline of the face onto the fabric (with a pencil, bad choice), then I very slowly stitched the outline on the machine (I tried doing it by hand and the results were less than pretty). Now I am currently filling in each monkey face by hand stitching each one. I've done about half of them.

Unfortunately the most tedious and difficult ones I left to the end (all the really tiny faces). And I'm due with baby #2 in about 4 weeks. ACK! At least this time I actually have a crib for my baby.

So anyways, this explains the extreme lack of posts over the past year. Hopefully that'll be changing soon as I get closer to finishing this beast, the nursery and get my body back to myself (you know, as much as you can have it to yourself with a new baby). Once it's closer to getting finished I'll post some updated pictures.

The Bean Chair

I've been wanting to have a bean bag chair for my son for awhile. I've seen really cute homemade ones before, and I always see people selling old ones on craigslist, so I figured I could find a cheap used one and make a new cover for it.

Unfortunately it seems that the moment I set out to find something, they because impossible to get. Either everyone ran out of used bean bag chairs, or they were always super far away. So instead I decided to scrounge up some supplies I already had and see what I could put together. (Note: old pillows work ok for stuffing when you have to, but they are hard to re-fluff as the chair gets used and loses it's shape)

1 Simplicity 5105 Pattern + 15 or so old pillows + cute & affordable upholstery fabric
= awesome DIY bean bag chair

It all was going great until the cute fabric part. I couldn't find anything the I liked in my price range for the life of me. It was fine at first because I had some spare cotton fabric that I wanted to use to sew a bladder to hold all the stuffing anyways.  I figured that a little later on I could sew a removable cover from the nice fabric which I could wash whenever it got dirty.

Here's the half-filled bean chair with one of the pillows I used:

As you can see the spare fabric I had isn't exactly boyish, or really cute at all.

I finished stuffing and sewing up the inside, but that's where all progress stopped for a few months. I just couldn't bring my self to spend very much on the outer fabric since this was turning out to be such a hodgepodge project. 

Fortunately my son was so excited about the prospect of something new to jump on that he didn't seem to notice the bean chair was completely covered in pink and purple flower print.  Phew!

Last week though I happened to stop by one of my favorite home decor fabric stores and they had recently marked down a bunch of their fabrics to $2/yd! They had this blue giraffe print cotton canvas which would be perfect! The bean chair finally done, and now I don't have to be embarrassed and shove it into the back room whenever we have people over into our living room!

Now it's the new favorite place to relax and play Mario.

Altogether this project cost me about $7 (The pattern was only $1, and $6 for the fabric). I'm pretty pleased since smaller ones I considered originally at Target go for about $25 and I like the print on this much better. I'm still going to keep my eye our for a cheap used one, just so I can get proper bean bag filling, but I'm surprised how well that the old pillow stuffing is working.

**Note: never use packing peanuts for stuffing. They rub against each other when you sit on it and make a sound just as irritating as nails on a blackboard. I originally made this mistake thinking it would add a little more bulk, and then had to go back and spend about half an hour picking out the peanuts from the fluff. Also they squish completely flat after a few sits.