Ivan’s DIY Outer Space Nursery
DIY nursery art, made with fabric & old photo frames with the glass removed.
Before we left for Mackay I took a few quick snaps of how Ivan’s nursery turned out. I intended to finish this post on the Monday evening when we arrived, but as it turned out my body had different plans for me. After that whole, you know, labour and baby business I barely remembered that I’d even made things for the nursery, let alone that I wanted to write about them.
We didn’t have a huge budget for getting ourselves set up for having a baby, so almost everything in the nursery is either second-hand or DIY, including the furniture. Our cot, cot mattress, bassinet, pram, baby bath, change table & the recliner chair for the nursery all came from the local buy/swap/sell Facebook page. The chest of drawers was given to us by my Mum & Dad, and they’ve had it forever. Except for a few little things all of Ivan’s clothes were either made by me, or hand-me-downs from awesomely generous people.
Our decorating budget for the nursery was non-existent, which made me quite sad – but then I got DIYing. I really wanted to do an outer space themed nursery, and this is what I came up with using a few old photo frames, two meters each of two different outer space fabrics, one ill-fitting t-shirt, some fabric from my second-hand stash and two single quilt cover/pillowcase sets.
I made this, and the other nursery art at the top of this post using photo frames with the glass removed. We got the frames on sale from Kmart a while back because they were missing the glass – they set us back about $2 each. This one was made using a Threadless t-shirt that didn’t fit me too well. I thought it was perfect for the nursery because this is exactly what we did when we found out Ivan was on his way. The “Ivan” frames were done using the space fabric & pieces of quilt cover – I think the letters turned out pretty damn good considering that I just eyeballed them!
Possible the coolest part of the nursery is these curtains. I’ve got to say that they were incredibly boring to sew, and a humongous bitch to get looking good. They darken up the room quite nicely the way that they are, but I’m planning to line them so that you can see the planets a little bit better. These curtains wrap around the whole nursery, from The Sun to Pluto (because I’m old school like that). I cut out the planets from pieces in my fabric stash, and the curtains are made out of the single quilt covers.
Nappy stacker! I used pieces from both my space fabrics for the front of this, and the back is quilt cover pieces. I vaguely followed this tutorial for how to put it all together. There is a stiff cardboard piece in the top & the bottom of this to make it keep it’s shape.
I am so happy with how this playmat turned out! The square in the middle is a quilt cover piece, surrounded by one of my space fabrics, and the bottom is a soft, brown terry-towelling fabric that I had hiding in my stash. I made these teddy bears too!
This baby bouncer was a cast-off from my workplace, and I recovered it using my space fabric. I was too lazy to make new fittings & a pillow piece for it, so I just left space in the cover to let the original ones through, haha. I also made a little toybox, using a cardboard packing box, some space fabric & a whole dang lot of craft glue. This was my inspiration for the toy box, even if mine ended up looking completely different!
Here’s a few more nursery snaps:
