fall crafting round up

Real talk: taking pictures of babies is hard.  He's never still for long enough and at some point in our mommy-Theo picture sessions he tries to eat the camera.  I have many, many pictures that look like some variation of this:

Which is awesome--perhaps even better than the "good" pictures?  I call this one "The Walking Theo".

Real talk, II: Being the mother of an infant while working full time has obviously left me with lots of time to work on crafting projects.  Given the absurdity of trying to get anything done with a child around, much less any sort of thing that requires sustained attention and/or thinking, it is ironic that I pulled out my sewing machine this fall for the first time in about five years.  Parenthood has apparently inspired me to be more efficient with my time (or something) in order to jump start my sewing life.  

Since we have turned our back computer room/alcove/hallway/mud room/closet/crawl hole/whatever into Theo’s room, and the breakfast bar in the kitchen looks into said room, a curtain needed to be made.  As the breakfast bar is an unusual size for a curtain, I couldn’t just buy one, and instead I took on curtain making as a labor of love.  My initial idea was to have a blue fabric with little white cloud pockets to hold small stuffed animals--a cloud curtain.  I went to IKEA in search of a suitable fabric, was unsuccessful in my original vision, and then totally scored with a revised vision--a forest curtain.   

The Fredrika fabric was on clearance, and looked modern and fairly simple, so I decided to modify it into a magical forest curtain instead (with tree pockets for stuffed animals/puppets). 

I measured out the fabric and cut out half circles/branches from felt in order to cover the bottom of a few trees (thus making them “magical”).  I decided to then add fabric accents on top of the felt tree bottoms to make them look colorful.  This process was the longest part of curtain making.

 

I then sewed them onto the fabric, added buttons to the non-magical trees and voila!  A curtain is born! 

Then I had to do it again for the other side (ugh).

In the end, I’m pretty happy with it—it’s really cheery for his room and the other (basic) side still looks good in our kitchen.   

I’m not sure that it’s very effective at keeping out noise, but it does offer some privacy and blocks out the light reasonably well.  I googled projects with this fabric to see what other things people had done with it.  I didn’t find any other pocket curtains, but I did find a tutorial for creating some tree pillows, which I made promptly made for maximum cutesie-ness.

 The other big fall project is the felt faux taxidermy elephant head (!) that I’m making for Theo’s room.  Surely you’ve been to Anthropologie lately and taken note of the paper mache taxidermy heads you can purchase for approximately one gazillion dollars?  No?  Well, let me tell you that faux taxidermy is all the ironic hipster rage these days.  I tried just winging it (no pattern or guidance except for a picture from some lady’s etsy shop) and it’s not as easy or cute looking as I thought it’d be, but here’s the progress so far.

 

How can I not want to make a million things for this little guy?