DIY Nursery Part 5: Easy Felt Animals

This post is Part 5 of a series on my DIY nursery.  Click here for Part1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

When Carl and I first started talking about a woodland nursery, I was a bit overwhelmed by the different stylistic choices within the general theme.  To me, there's few things more irksome in a room than things that should be similar, but are just different enough to stand out.  It's why I obsess over matching colors and stylistic choices and try very hard to pick something inspirational to work from.  For example, I knew I wanted to use the crib bedding as our theme anchor point - sheets are relatively portable so easy to go shopping with, and as part of the crib, be part of a central focal point in the room.  I'd narrowed our bedding options down to the four options below.  Each of them has a very different color scheme and stylistic feel though.  Mixing and matching just wasn't an option to me.  I'm far too much of a perfectionist.

Our theme inspirational choices.  We opted for the bottom right.

  

We eventually chose the bottom right option because it wasn't too babyish so kiddo will be able to use it long into the toddler years, there were lots of colors to match to, and Carl didn't like the modern look of the upper right.  No matter what option we chose, I knew that finding coordinating pieces would be difficult. With a little time and patience though, we could easily make standard, plain pieces match the theme we had chose.  And so, my menagerie of little felt critters was born.  Here's how to make your own felt critters that you can use to decorate crib skirts, hampers, storage bins, or whatever else you might have in your nursery.

Step 1: Make your pattern
To make my pattern, I opened up the picture of my bedsheets on Amazon.com's website and then zoomed in on the image using my browser's zoom function on my external monitor.  I then put a piece of printer paper up against the monitor and lightly traced all the outlines that shined through with a pencil.  I then cut around the outside of each critter / shape.

Step 2: Cut your felt
Look at your critter and decide which layer is your base layer.  For my owl, I decided the thin layer of green that was underneath his belly and wings would be the base.  I also made a fox, and used orange for his base layer.  Cut out the outline of the entire animal from the base layer.

  

Next, carefully cut out the shape of the next layer.  For my owl, I wanted his tail to be a layer underneath the green.  The wing was in the way of cutting a smooth tail shape, so I smoothed it out in a way that made sense to me.

Continue cutting each shape out of your paper pattern and then your felt, placing them as you go so you can see the animal build and adjust any pieces that may have been traced or cut a little off.  Always work from the larger, lower layers up.  For example, cut out the face, and then entire eyeball before cutting out the pupils.

Step 3: Glue

Finally, glue all of your pieces together.  I used Aileen's Tacky glue and made sure to keep everything f and undisturbed while drying.  I'm only going to be tacking these animals on things like a crib skirt, storage bins, and a hamper, so any kind of household white glue should be enough to keep them together.  If I were going to put this on a pillow or something that would be handled a lot, I'd probably upgrade to E6000 or pull out the sewing machine.  

And that's it!  I whipped together these little no sew critters in well under an hour each and they are a great way to get the same cartoon-feel of our sheets throughout the rest of the room.  

DIY Nursery Part 4: Handmade Crib Skirt

This post is Part 4 of a series on my DIY nursery.  Click here for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5

Our beautiful hand-dyed yellow crib needed an equally adorable crib skirt to tie everything together.  That said, calling this project a crib "skirt" seems a little misleading, since it quite honestly is just three hemmed rectangles tacked onto the mattress support.  First off, if you've ever shopped for crib skirts you will be amazed at the wide variety in price points (anywhere from $10 to $104 including shipping), and yet surprising lack of color or character in any of them.  So.  Many.  White ruffly things that are going to bunch up in an unsightly fashion when you lower the crib as baby grows.  Clearly, I'm not the only one with this gripe, as I found this fabulous and entertaining blog post on How to Make / Sew an Easy DIY Crib Skirt.  I used 52 1/4" inches of 60" wide gray decorator canvas I had left over from another project and then followed the instructions basically to the letter.   The lighting in this picture isn't great, but the gray matches the wall color surprisingly well.  Finally, I added my own special touches by sewing on premade pompom trim (approx $3.25 a yard after coupons) and handmade felt appliques that perfectly match the critters in the crib sheets we picked out.  All told, the project cost me about $12 in trim and felt, plus it helped me clean out the fabric stash that is currently taking over half of Baby's closet.  I call that a win!