Girly (yet not too girly) Nursery Decor

It was a challenge......design the baby's room in a way that said "Welcome Home, Little Girl!" sans pastel pink, Disney Princess and ruffles galore. After a good 3 1/2 months of work, I think we may have succeeded.  Let's get into the nitty gritty..........

Frito checking out the lay of the land.

First off: The quilt. This as you know for those of you following my instagram/facebook was my first quilting project ever. The fabrics were collected from various places with Etsy being the main supplier. Echino was definitely a favorite for patterns. In fact, the underside of the quilt (which is obviously not pictured) features a black Echino animal print that will make another appearance as the chair upholstery. I probably spent about 70 dollars total on fabric (the Echino prints took up about $35 of that cost), thread, trim and batting. The hours that I put into this puppy though....I can't even begin to count up. 

Luckily from this angle, the flaws aren't visible 

The seating area! We decided to go with a futon in lieu of a rocker or nursing chair. One, I love sitting cross legged. Futons are glorious for this! Two, the futon gives us the ability to host an overnight guest during these early years. We don't have a dedicated guest room in a two bedroom home so this is it. I scored the side table at Goodwill for 9 dollars. Bam! Perfect! The lamp was something we had and ended up a perfect match. Our friend Paul made the beautiful wood shelf and when he moved, had no space to accomodate. He came by and installed it and I used the space to display some of my favorite toys from my childhood. The rug? We got a gift card for FAB.com from David's uncle and aunt. When we realized the color scheme of the room, we selected this beauty.

Cozy!

One thing I wanted to put into the baby's room was a small workspace for myself. A place to charge the laptop, store some writing materials and personal things. A desk was going to be just the addition I needed. After searching Craigslist for a few weeks, I came across this guy locally. I painted the knobs to match the walls and placed my supplies inside. The chair was a Pasadena flea market find which I recovered in the Echino animal print (a laminated version) I mentioned earlier. Somewhere on the blog there is a post about the chair but at the moment I am too lazy to link it up. The mirror was picked up down the street at a neighbors yard sale. The bookshelves...or shall I say spice racks.....are from IKEA. 4 bucks a piece. They are great as they promote literacy with the covers facing out. As a preschool teacher, I used to use rain gutters in the classroom to achieve this concept but they weren't too aesthetically pleasing. This spice rack idea was floating around some design blogs and I jumped on it!

Cute and colorful workspace for me!

We ordered the crib with some gift cards from JCP. The Jenny Lind style seemed to fit the look we were aiming for. The sombreros? I always needed a place to display part of my collection!

We ended up hitting Amazon for the matching changing table. Baskets were all found at Marshall's with the exception of one we had lying around the house. The ice cream print came from Shine Gallery at the Farmer's Market. It used to reside in the kitchen but it seemed appropriate to move to this new location. 

This beauty was a shower gift from my friend Genia. The colors are gorgeous. The yarn is amazingly soft. And most importantly....it is homemade. One of the most precious gifts received. I paired it up with a previous handmade blanket for the time being.

Some details: A little bit of family! The orange planter came from my grandparents' home. The little car toy is a hand me down from David's sister and niece.

All in all, I am really jazzed about the room thus far. We are still waiting for the mattress to arrive but for the most part we are finished. It took a lot of time, love and not as much money as I had anticipated with the hand me downs, garage sales and flea market finds. We had to go full price on the futon, crib and changer, but that is about it. I am finding myself sitting on the couch and just taking it all in waiting for the room to take on a life of its own once little girl arrives.........

DIY Nursery Projects

With the initial hullabaloo of moving subsided, I have been able to focus on getting some baby projects started. For awhile, the designated baby room has been the moving catch-all with boxes and miscellaneous crap all over the floor. Just this past weekend, most of what shouldn't be in there is finally out. The sorting and decorating is moving forward. We have been fortunate in receiving some key pieces of baby gear from David's sister including a Bugaboo Stroller, a Pack N Play, an Ergo as well as a box of clothes and toys! Amazing! Thanks Jennifer (and lil' Aya!)

Wanting to keep budget conscious, we did our research and made the following decisions: a crib from JCP.com using some gift cards accumulated from the holiday time, a desk to be dazzled up from Craigslist.com (40 bucks!), Echino Fabrics off of Etsy to create the baby quilt and matching laminate to upholster the desk chair, wooden chair from the PCC swap meet and the one full price item, a Jenny Lind changing table off of Amazon. The two big pieces left are going to be a futon...to both sit with lil' girl and accomodate family when they come and a rug of sorts for the floor.

The only project that got started this weekend was redoing the knobs for the desk. I really wish that I had taken a before, but I got so into the hands on that snapping pics just wasn't on my mind. I was fortunate enough to have some baby blue spray paint from one of my work projects and lo and behold....it matched the wall color perfectly!

Up next on my list is to re-cover the chair. In all honesty, this chair does not need to be recovered but I have a vision of matching prints and seeing as how I now have the laminate in hand, it is a go. I am going to leave the original on and just use the staple gun to adhere around the existing vinyl. We shall see how it goes. 

Adorable chair from the Pasadena City College Flea Market

This laminate will be the new seat cover!

I will keep you posted on how the project unfolds. Oh! And my other budget find of the weekend was a nice board book copy of Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you see? for 2 bucks at a little antique shop yesterday. Score!

DIY Wedding Cake Stands

Ugh. Cake stands. Well, that was my initial thought...especially after pricing them on sites like Amazon. Sure 25 bucks a pop isn't too much, but when you need 5 and then factor in shipping it ends up being another $150 purchase added to an ever growing wedding budget. Plus, 25 bucks gets you a stand, but not the one that meshes best with the wedding theme. After doing some internet research, I came across a few sites that mentioned making stands yourself using found objects at the thrift strore. Bam! This seemed like the way to go. Many of the sites added the additional step of spray painting the completed project when finished to a color that matches your decor. While I went into the project with that step in mind, I quickly changed my mind after finding the amount of clear glassware (platters, candlesticks, glasses etc) in my search. The clear would be a perfect fit with the amount of color already in the works. 

Materials: 

Glassware

Epoxy

Heavy books

Goo Gone

Some of the dish finds from the 1st trip to St. Vincent De Paul. I washed them and found that I needed to use Goo Gone in order to get some of the yuck off from years of who knows what before their presence at the thrift store. 

Using a heavy book to help the epoxy set and cure.

Close up of two of my favorites

The final five which will be donned with cakes and sweets!

The project was pretty easy and just took a little over 2 hours....including cleaning and prepping the glass, applying the epoxy and letting it stand through the initial cure time of one hour.

Loteria! Escort Cards: Button Style!

With the wedding in just 22 days, you can imagine my excitement to have the escort cards arrive. "Cards?" you say? "They look more like pins." Right you are. For the wedding, David really had his mind set on having some sort of punk-rock-pin moment and the escort cards were just the place.  Each of the 12 tables will have an enlarged Loteria! card as the number. We've got La Mano, La Chulupa and La Calavera to name a few. On the escort card table (or jewelry spinner as my amazing friend Amy has set up) will be cards with guests names and their pin with table icon. The name cards have yet to be created but here is a sneak peek at the awesome pins. 

                                          la arana

                                                                         
                                                                       

                                          el tambor


                                                                     
                                                                         

                                          el valiente

Pins created at AffordableButtons.com

I will post more as the project progresses!

DIY Wedding Decor: Mini Pinatas

After being totally inspired by the JCrew / Confetti System collaboration, I decided that I needed to have mini pinata ornaments in some was shape or form at the wedding. After deciding on a color palette of Orange, Fuchsia and Green, I decided I could begins crafting some of these puppies up. I found the ornament templates at Michael's. When I got home, the first thing was to cut strips of tissue paper and fringe them. Next, I started at the bottom of each pinata and using a tiny amount of Elmer's glue, I attached each row of fringe on top of one and other. The sphere ornament was by far the most difficult to do. The diamond shaped one, while time consuming as each side needed to be done separately, was the easiest because the tissue sat the nicest do to the flat surfaces. I am going to head back to another Michaels location to see what other shapes there are to play with. The Glendale locale was a bit low on supplies.....

I will post more as they come along....we are thinking of either placing them on the centerpieces or in the Chuppa somehow.

Finished! DIY Loteria Wedding Invitations!

They're finished!!!!

Finally. After starting this Save-the-date and Wedding Invitation project back in December, the final round is ready to be dropped at the post! The final invite looks something like this:

During my last trip to the Paper Source I remembered to take a gander at their decorative string. My initial thought was one of those red and white intertwined threads, but when I saw the gold there was no question. Additionally, the nice thing about the gold is that there is a bit of a tooth and when tied together, it had the ability to hold the RSVP card securely in the middle of the invite.

The invite, when opened, includes just the two cards, but for the sake of informative blogging, I have placed both sides of the card up so you can have the full effect:


It was a long project in the making, but I am ultimately pleased with the outcome!

Budget Wedding Discoveries

In the midst of the wedding planning, I have uncovered some tidbits of information that I found to be useful in regards to planning a wedding on a budget.

1) Skip the Saturday! I know Saturday is such a perfect day to get married. Most folks have Sunday off of work to rest the next day. Also, for your Monday 9 to 5-ers that you have flying in from other cities, a Saturday is perfect for those that have to be mindful of how many days to take off. However, when pricing venues here in Los Angeles, I was surprised to see such a price difference for Saturday. I can't speak for all venues, but the location we chose, Marvimon House, deciding to have the ceremony and reception on a Friday night rather than Saturday saved us a pretty penny. Had we been willing to do the wedding on a Thursday, we would have saved even more. However, with our work schedules and those of our guests, this wasn't an option with the amount of out of towners on our list.

2) Multiple Cakes! While we haven't secured a cake yet, we have found out that they are pretty pricey if one has a typical fancy and multiple tiered cake in mind. In my cake searches, I have seen many weddings have multiple small cakes in lieu of the big one. This way you can appease different tastes and also save some serious cash. Some places here in LA that we are looking at are Lark Cake Shop and Delilah's. We are also planing on having additional goodies like Mexican Wedding Cookies!


3) Invitations....make 'em! It does't hurt to have a crafty friend here, I'll be honest. Having gone to art school, I am surrounded by creatives! This makes the homemade invitation thing a bit easier to digest, but fear not....it is not that difficult. Just time consuming. If you have patience and some basic organizational skills, this is an areas to save some serious cash. A simple google search for "DIY wedding invites" will pull up several ideas as simple as cute xeroxes all the way to hand made letterpressed invites for those rare folks with access to a press.

4) Dress. I am still on this one, but what I have learned is that one can find BEAUTIFUL white evening dresses in the fancy section of upscale department stores. Because they are not "wedding" dresses (although some look just like them....) they are considerably less expensive. I have my heart set on a BHLDN dress but an torn with the idea of buying the dress without having the ability to try it on. And it is not one that could really qualify as a budget dress! ;)


I'll post more as I continue may way through this process!!!

Onward to the Invitations........

In keeping with the Mexican wedding theme already established by the save the date cards, I decided to work with the Loteria cards that I had earlier purchased. After a few days of unsuccessfully putting together mock up and assemblies, I enlisted the help of my good friend Nick. Nick and I had collaborated on several projects in the past from playing in bands together to working on projects during art school. If there ever was a creative problem, Nick is who you want to help solve it.

Immediately, we decided that using the Loteria cards as a backing to the invite was the way to go. What took some playing around was how to get the gold band on the top and bottom of the card. We bought some foil tape at Michaels but realized after trying some out that it was not going to cut the mustard. Luckily, Nick has an arsenal of supplies in his truck including both gold spray paint and painters tape...specifically frog tape. Fully fueled on churros and Mexican cokes, we returned from Olvera street with 40 miniature sarapes and were ready to start spraying.


Taping off the edges with frog tape


These will be the RSVP cards. One Loteria card per RSVP. Both sides have the gold bands and the flip side will eventually have the RSVP info done in stamp format akin to the save the dates



The invite. The bingo side is the back while the side with the gold bands and sarapes will house the info (time, place, etc). Again, the info will be hand lettered and put into stamp format like the save the dates.

Save the Date cards....FIN!

So the cards are done! David had a good idea of using a custom stamp to print all the info on each card. I designed an image that would compliment the papel picado on the top and we scanned the image to . The stamp arrived last night in the mail and excitement had me stamping, assembling and gluing until way past my bed time.