Nursery Know How

Due to popular demand :) here's how we did the more creative elements of the nursery -

1) Fabric Canvas Collages (for Adanise) - we bought canvases and fabrics from the clearance section at Joanns. I thought I was buying small sections of fabric but ended up with tons left over so buy really really small amounts. Without trying to sound stereotypical we just picked fabrics that we liked and looked "African" to us. We stapled a piece of fabric over the whole canvas. The fabrics on top (the shapes and letters) were just hot glued on. It was really easy. The most time consuming part was cutting things out. The harder things (like the letters) we did by printing out the shape, hot gluing that to a swatch of fabric and cutting out with an exacto knife. The CHOSEN and elephant canvases I did after my Mom suggested I use wonder under. The process of getting them ready for being cut out took longer but overall it was much easier using the wonder under than hot glue and exacto knife. I had never done anything like this before and somehow got this idea in my head. Very beginner friendly.

2) The Amharic on the wall - hmmm. I googled Amharic Bible and was able to locate the verse I wanted thanks to the references also being in English. At first I thought I would freehand two verses. Um, no. I decided two verses was pushing over-achiever status and I needed to bring it down a bit. The Amharic letters are very detailed. Stencils would have been nice but how do you make Amharic stencils anyway? Again my Mom who didn't want to get within 10 feet of this project suggested the easiest thing to do. We borrowed an overhead projector from church. We then tried printing on the transparency (didn't work) and tried to print out the letters to the perfect size to trace onto the transparency (didn't work). Finally we ended up getting the perfect size on the computer screen and very gently tracing directly from the screen onto the transparency with a marker. Good thing Brian wasn't home or we would have not been able to do that. We then projected the writing onto the wall (in sections because it was too long to all be projected at once) and used tiny paintbrushes to color in between the lines. The wall texture did not make it easy. Overall it took about 4 hours (including prep time) for one short verse.

For Renee - the children's stool is small but surprisingly comfortable for us bigger bottomed people. It fit lying down on its side into a standard size suite case. It is solid wood so no fear of it breaking during transport. My Mom also said they had larger "adult" stools too.

It was all well worth it!!