one room challenge linking event week four: "hanging" in there!

So yesterday was a good day for sewing:

And I had a lot of sewing to do, as somehow there are only two weeks left in Calling It Home's One Room Challenge! Participating as a guest this "spring" has made these last few weeks of pregnancy go by fast...maybe too fast! I may not be ready, but it's looking like the nursery will be!

Here are the links to my last few posts so you can see my plans and progress so far!:

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Also be sure to catch-up on the other beautiful room transformations by the featured designers and all of the other guest participants!

Last week I left off talking about tackling the curtains and the paper lantern project in the nursery, so today I'm going to show you what's hanging in the nursery (<-- see what I did there?)...starting with the curtains:

After hemming and hawing about what to do with the windows, I fell in love with the following idea I found on Pinterest and my mind was finally made up:

 Michele Krantzow

So I bought simple white curtains from Target and found some--well, 36 yards!--of pretty yellow pom pom fringe on Etsy to trim the window treatments and recreate the budget-friendly look:

Target

 Creative Trims on Etsy

Don't judge, but I also bought some (seriously) cheap roller shades from Lowe's to help filter the light and hopefully help with nap time. I planned to glue the fringe onto the shades and sew it onto the curtains--here is my loot (albeit before I exchanged the blue-ish cotton/poly blend curtains for the 100% cotton ones above that are, in fact, white...and before I had the shades re-cut a bit bigger to actually fit the windows. Nothing's ever easy!):

(And no--the glue gun is not new, but I am OCD and keep everything in it's original packaging.)

Here is how the windows looked before, with their dusty cellular shades (which--I might venture to say--are worse than the roller shades?):

I mounted simple curtain rods and then started with the shades, as I knew they would be easy...and I tend to put off anything that is not!:

(Taken after dark so the fringe would stand out...)

I am far from a seamstress, so I was dreading the curtain portion of the program and procrastinated until I couldn't stand it anymore (aaand until I really wanted my breakfast room back...).

As my midwives are always telling me, the anticipation is worse than the reality! The sewing actually turned out to be somewhat therapeutic--the frustrating part was gluing the fringe to the tops of the curtains (so as not to sew the rod pockets closed) and ironing the freshly cleaned curtains that were twice the length of my ironing board:

After sewing 30 yards(!) of fringe onto the curtains, I finally ran out of white thread, so with five curtains down and one to go, I will have to go buy more and finish the curtain project this week. Here is a sneak peek in the meantime:

So close, yet so far away...

As for the paper lantern project, that was no easy feat either!

Back in week one, I mentioned that I wanted to incorporate paper lanterns into the nursery design to reflect the hot air balloons featured in the Babar books, as well as to compliment the other Babar accents I plan to include in the nursery. This was my inspiration:

Alina

...and I wish I had had the stamina to follow Alina's amazing tutorial, but I went with the modified version...as I am doing a lot these days.

I loved this little paper lantern mobile I came across on Etsy, but I was looking for an electrified version to hang as a source of soft light above our glider. I couldn't find one, so I decided to make my own!

Janie Girl Crafts on Etsy

I purchased three Premium Paper Lanterns similar to the ones above, but bigger, from Luna Bazaar. Unfortunately they didn't come with cord sets/light kits (hence the "no easy feat"), so I decided to make my own using extension cords that were long enough (15') to begin with, but could be adjusted accordingly, and with light sockets small enough to fit the lanterns and not pop out the tops of them!:

As you can see, I had to put on my electrician's hat to make the cord sets/light kits--a project I ended up enjoying even more than the sewing, as I discovered that creating a light fixture that actually functions is almost as gratifying as creating a human! 

Here is how I did it:

I roughly measured and cut off the socket end of the extension cords...

...and then split and stripped the cords to expose just enough wire to crimp on little spade terminals...

...with which I was able to connect the newly cut cords to the bulb sockets (say it with me: "smooth side to brass, ridged side to silver!")...

...and then there was light!:

I suspended the lanterns using the actual cords and bulbs because the bulb fasteners that were included with the lanterns' frames didn't work very well...eh-hem:

I placed small hooks in the ceiling above where I wanted each lantern to hang, and then a larger hook in the corner of the ceiling to gather all three cords together:

Voilà--an electrified paper lantern mobile-ish!:

Other than the unsightly (albeit unavoidable) visibility of the cords above the lanterns, I think the fixture is very close to what I envisioned...and more importantly, fun! We have placed our glider under the lanterns (which has hidden the unsightly cords below), but I will wait until the big reveal to show you the final look.

Speaking of the final reveal, I doubt I will include the closet, but in the spirit of blogging about hanging in the nursery (<--never gets old), I bought a bunch of these cute, colorful organizers at Babies 'R Us:

Babies R Us

As I have mentioned in my previous posts, also hanging in the nursery are my own smocked dresses--many of which my mother made for me, various Little Darlings prints from The Animal Print Shop, as well as a Babar poster and a decorative pennant banner among some other accessories which I will include in next week's post about all of the fun little details I plan to include in the nursery design! Until then...