Miss K's new room (finally)

As promised for several weeks now, here are photos of Miss K's new bedroom. For anyone who can't remember what it looked like before, check here for photos taken before the redecorating started. Now before I even upload these photos I must tell you to disregard all of the toys and crap on the floor I missed while I was cleaning up her room today. Just pretend that you don't see them, that's what I do. And also apologies for the amateur photography too, I know you're meant to take photos during the day allowing as much natural sunlight in as possible, but given that the weather here today was cloudy and miserable I just used the flash.

This is the nappy stacker that I made the other weekend. It is so much bigger than her old one, I can actually fit in an entire box of nappies now which means no more boxes cluttering up my floors. I've actually had a friend request one of these for her nursery as she wants a Winnie the Poo themed room and can't find a nappy stacker she likes.

The sign you have already seen, but the picture border above it was the result of many hours tearing apart old books, laminating the pages and squinting at walls to see if the lines were straight. Nine times out of ten they weren't (damn my lazy eye) but in the end I managed to get it to work. As an added bonus the wall border fits the walls exactly, thanks to some creative layering in some places, and spacing in others, the book starts right behind the door on one side, and stretches perfectly around the room.

This is some more of the picture border, as well as some paintings I did from the book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish. I was stoked with how the canvases came out, and they were a lot brighter than the ones you can buy from speciality stores in America. The orange isn't really fluro as it looks here, that is just the result of my flash.

A close up of the canvases. I know they are crooked, Miss K keeps kicking the wall and given they are right behind the cot I have the hardest time keeping them straight. I've already surrendered and let them lie wherever they want. 

Miss K's new reading corner. There will eventually be a reading light on the bookshelf, but we are having a hard time modifying a normal table lamp so that it has a goose neck attached, but once it's finished the effect will be amazing. I'll post pictures as soon as it is finished.

As you can probably tell from the inside of these stacking baskets they used to be two different shades of pink. I realised that they didn't really fit in with the new colours in the room pretty quickly, but luckily for me I had plenty of the material used on Miss K's new quilt cover left over so an evening spent cutting and glueing and I had a new matching piece of furniture to put Miss K's body suits and bibs in.

I found lots of wonderful Dr Seuss quotes all over the internet, and I wanted to incorporate them into the bedroom. A lot of people get them turned into wall decals, but given I didn't have the budget for this I turned them into small pictures. There are three of them in total, this one says "Why fit in when you were born to stand out" and it fills the blank space left by removing the lattice on her wall. They will be framed eventually to make them stand out against the wall.

Another Dr Seuss quote

The last Dr Seuss quote. 

I made the paper by tearing red and white paper into strips and then pasting the strips together. The quotes are written with letter stickers which I luckily have in abundance with thanks to my obsession with collecting scrap booking materials.

The placement of the last two Dr Seuss quotes.

Miss K's play area with a lovely new foam jigsaw puzzle mat. I love that it brings a huge splash of colour to an otherwise boring grey carpet, and on the plus side I have something soft to sit on when I'm playing tea parties.

Miss K's cot, complete with the new quilt. The sheet is only temporary until I can find one in a colour that better compliments the quilt cover. Why is it so hard to find white sheet covers these days??

The cot from a different angle. Ignore the storage underneath. It turned out the material for the cot quilt and the nappy stacker were the most expensive purchases made for the entire room, coming to around $50 in the end. The rest of the stuff was part of my stash of crafty things, 

So there you have it. For under $100 Miss K has a completely new room that she absolutely loves. We have to go around the room and look at everything before she goes to bed every night, and I've found it also works in distracting her when she's throwing a particularly bad temper tantrum. Now that I've been bitten by the decorating bug I'm determined to turn my room into something equally as pretty.

Dear diary the busy beaver edition

So as I predicted I haven't had much time for blogging these past few days. Miss K has been recovering from her virus nicely these past few days, and she is almost back to her normal sunny self finally. But that doesn't mean that the whole family is healthy right now. Two of my sisters have various infections and viruses, and one of my nieces has come out in a rash similar to Miss K's. Gotta love winter for the colds and bugs it spreads.

I have actually managed in between giving Miss K paracetamol and chasing after her to get some of her room redecorated this week, and it is starting to really come together. I've rearranged some of her furniture, taken down all of the decorations from her jungle themed room, and I've almost finished putting up her new wall border. If I can get a spare five minutes tomorrow I can finish that job and find another one that needs doing. I'm very pleased with the results so far, and I cannot wait to share them with you guys once I've taken more photos.

Well I have been a very busy little beaver this weekend, so much so that I now need another weekend just to get over this weekend. Yesterday I went shopping at Spotlight to take advantage of their fabric sales to buy some material for a new nappy stacker for Miss K's bedroom. I realised as I was starting to put the room together that her current pale blue nappy stacker didn't fit in with the rest of the room, so I decided to splurge on some Dr Seuss quilting fabric so I could whip up a new one for her. And whip up I did, with thanks to a free pattern I found online. It took me about 4 hours in total, part of which came from difficult to understand sewing instructions for a beginner like me, but I managed to pull it together in the end and I am ecstatic with the results. I'll have photos up once it's installed in Miss K's bedroom.

Today was also jam packed with activity, I took Miss K to get her photos taken by a professional today, which was an absolute disaster! To start with she was tired because I stupidly agreed to a sitting time that went over nap time, so she wasn't interested in sitting still and behaving herself for five minutes so we could get a nice picture. Then the photographer sat her on a chair that was too tall for her, and when she decided she had had enough of sitting down, she tried to get off the chair by belly flopping to the floor. I'm not certain how Miss K would have reacted if the photographer hadn't screamed when she did this, all of my family have long ago learned to not react to Miss K's tumbles until she does, and we have averted many tears in this way, however when someone new comes in, they don't always know this rule, and they react the way the photographer does, which is always guaranteed to make Miss K cry. That was the end of the photos for us, and just quietly I think the photographer was happy to see us leave. I'll pick the photos up next month, so I'll be interested to see if she was able to get any decent shots from us.

We also went out for tea tonight for my nephew's birthday, and then back to my sister's house for cake afterwards. It was a very enjoyable evening, and when we finally went home at 9 o'clock, I was actually disappointed that the evening had to end. But given that both Miss K and I were ready for bed it was a relief to get home and get into my jammies. My nephew's birthday isn't actually until Tuesday, so we'll actually get to celebrate it twice, and I've held off giving him his new Dr Dreadful set until Tuesday too, and I can't wait to see the look on his face when he realises he is now able to make zombie brains and eat them.

Well that's another week re-capped for now, I'm off to bed finally and glad to be going there too. I'll be back again soon as Miss K is almost completely better so I'll have a little more time on my hands this week. Although I think I will miss the extra cuddles I get from her when she isn't feeling a hundred percent. When she is healthy she is too full of beans to sit still long enough to hug her mother, so I take advantage of any extra affection any chance I can get.

Dear diary the Kerplunk edition

So my soundtrack to today's diary entry is the chorus of groans and clacks of a game of Kerplunk currently being played on the coffee table by mum and the kids. One of the babies has gone home, but the last two are still here waiting for mum and dad to come back from Melbourne (hopefully with junk food).

This week certainly was more eventful than the last few weeks combined, we have had a zoo of children keeping us entertained, I got heaps of decorations completed for Miss K's new bedroom and I even got a hair cut during the week. This was actually a big deal for me because it's been over 12 months since I've had anything done to my hair so there was a lot of hair sitting on top of my head before this week. I had decided that it was getting too long and heavy, and I was getting tired of having to deal with it so I got my little sister to chop off 6 inches of hair. I now have shoulder length hair and I feel about 5 kilos lighter too. I also get out of the shower about five minutes faster these days as I don't have to shampoo and condition so much hair.

Miss K has been gorgeous as always, this week she has started copying words that she hears everyone else say, and as a result she can now say get up, ding dong and no. She also takes great delight in shouting my name at the top of her lungs first thing in the morning to try and get me to come pick her up out of her cot and feed her. Given that I hate mornings, I usually stall her by yelling back at her for as long as I can before she throws a tantrum and I'm forced to get out of bed. She has also discovered that everyone laughs if she blows raspberries whenever we say someone's name, so we spend lots of time just repeating everyone's name so she will razz at whoever we've mentioned. I'm not sure if it's a good thing that we're just as easily amused as the baby is.

I also managed to get my hands on two copies of Dr Seuss' ABC book thanks to eBay, so once I've received them in the mail I can finally get Miss K's bedroom decorated. I know I keep promising that I'll have photos posted, and I have managed so far to take photos of the new quilt, which really doesn't look like much on its own, but here is the fruits of three hours labour.

Miss K's new quilt

My lovely niece was kind enough to be my model for this photo, and you can see her feet peeking out from the bottom of the doona. Unfortunately given that the blanket is almost as tall as her and quite heavy she couldn't hold it for very long so this is the best shot I could get.

Well that's another week summed up for you, Miss K is starting to cry for her dinner so for now I'm outta here, I'll see you next time.

Adventures in baby sitting, baking and sewing

I almost don't want to keep putting posts up here at the moment. You see last night's post was post number 69 for me, and given that that is my favourite number (for obvious reasons) I would love to leave it right there, just so that I can come back and giggle every time I see it. I never said that I was mature, in fact most people who know me would say that I'm the exact opposite.

So it has been an absolute circus at our house today, we had children in every corner of the house since mum and I seem to be the only people in the world who don't like doing things on weekends, we were the only ones who could be pinned down long enough to watch every child in our family. My big sister is very lucky enough to have a wonderful husband who has taken her to Melbourne for the weekend to celebrate her birthday, and my little brother and his wife were spending this weekend moving house, so to make sure their little girl was out of the way she came here and had a play date with all of her cousins. So a child in every corner may have been an over exaggeration, especially given there were only three extra kids in the house, but there were times when it sounded like we had a whole soccer team squashed into our lounge room.

Given that we had such a packed house today, I thought it would be a perfect time to prove that I could be domestic if I wanted to, by sewing a quilt cover for Miss K's new Dr Seuss bedroom, baking banana muffins for dessert, and making sure that Miss K's current bedroom was spotless when she went to bed. (This was no small task since she and her little cousin had spent a good half hour earlier in the day pulling every toy, book and piece of clothing out of it's home and throwing them on the ground.)

Out of all of these tasks, the one that proved the hardest was sewing a quilt cover. You wouldn't think that sewing a piece of fabric into a rectangle shape and attaching some snap buttons on would be so hard, but it actually ended up taking me about 3 hours to do all up. Of course I had lots of little helpers who were very curious as to what I was doing, and took great pleasure in walking and sitting all over the fabric while I was trying to measure and pin it. But the real problem was the fact that I have so very little sewing experience in my life, and I struggle to sew in a straight line. Add in tricky things like snap buttons and hems and I come completely undone. But I managed to get it finished in the end, and it is even big enough to put the quilt in, which is no small accomplishment for me given that I never have enough attention span to follow the old measure twice cut once rule.

So with all the really big jobs completed for Miss K's new bedroom, it won't be long before I will be able to put the whole thing together and watch her enjoy her new space. Of course I'll have photos up here very soon of the progress I've made so far. And given that I've managed to get everything done so far for about $50 I'm even considering going on eBay to buy some Dr Seuss books for the picture border, as I still can't find a second hand store around here that sells his books.

Well I'm off to bed now, as tomorrow is looking to be another busy day and I'll need my beauty hibernation if I'm going to be able to chase around a group of kids for another day. Stay awesome my wonderful readers and I'll be back again soon.

Dear diary the distracted edition

So I can't promise that this will be a cohesive blog tonight, as I currently have a hyperactive 23 year old sitting in my lounge room hyping up my incredibly active 1 year old, despite the fact that it is 11:30 at night and we should all be in bed.

So another week is over, and it seems that everything exciting is still happening which makes it hard to write about it, as I don't know how it ends. I'm pretty sure it will end in Miss K getting tired and crying until I put her into bed with Elmo. But right now she is sitting on the couch with my little brother and his partner, watching a singing cucumber. I can't even begin to explain this in any way that will make sense, so all I can tell anyone who wants to know more is go to YouTube and type in Silly Songs with Larry. There will be much silliness to be found once you have done this, including a song about teeth, as well as pirates who don't do anything.

Miss K and I went to my big sister's house for dinner last night with mum and one of my little sisters, we had a pleasant evening eating take out food, and all was very enjoyable except for the part when one of my fillings fell out of my tooth making eating slightly difficult. Of course these things always happen on the weekend which means I have to wait until tomorrow to make an appointment with a dentist. Miss K is also getting a cold at the moment, so there are times when she is whingy and clingy, but for the most part she is her usual exuberant self. I pulled out her guitar this week, so any time we go to her bedroom she insists on stopping to play a song for me. I love watching her strum away at the guitar, even though it's too tall for her to even carry around, but she enjoys it anyway.

I mentioned ages ago that I was going to change Miss K's bedroom around and turn it into a Dr Seuss room. Well for anyone who has been dying to hear an update on this (don't hide it, I know you guys too well) I have finally started making her decorations. I have found pictures from the book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish and am turning them into paintings to hang on her wall. I'm also going to attempt to sew her a new quilt cover in red and white striped material so her bed looks like the Cat in the Hat's hat, and I'm also trying to find old books to tear apart and turn into a picture border for her walls, but for some reason no one ever gives their old Dr Seuss books to second hand stores these days, so this task is proving harder than I thought. I'll have pictures posted up here soon of the works in progress if I ever get around to taking them, and then once the project is finished, I'll be sure that you guys get to see it too. (Just because I know you're all on the edge of your seats wanting to know how it will look.)

Well that's another week's round up completed, it's not much I know, but if I told you absolutely everything I did this week it really would only take up another couple of sentences and would go along the lines of I chased Miss K around the house stopping her from putting everything in her mouth. Then I went to bed. So until next time, I'm going to stop Miss K from putting things in her mouth by putting her to bed. Then I'm going to bed. Stay awesome my wonderful readers and I'll be back again soon.