Art and Craft - Project Nursery.

Coming up with ideas on how to decorate a nursery can be tricky - there are so many things you can do! But as we are not finding out the sex of Baby V until he/she is born, I had to do something that would be suitable for either a little boy or girl while still being bright and cheerful.

So I set out to make my own artwork to decorate the baby's room. I did some research online and found that lots of people used the paint colour cards that you can get from any hardware store and transformed them into gorgeous, framed pieces.

So one weekend I took myself down to my local Bunnings and loaded up on a bundle of paint swatches. I decided I wanted to concentrate on four colour families - blues, greens, purples and yellows.

Paint swatches from Bunnings

Then I went and got myself a 3cm round hole punch from Spotlight. This set me back around $10 (if you are hunting for one go to the scrapbooking area or buy one online). I chose a circle shape, but you can get any shaped hole punch you like.

$10 Fiskars hole punch from Spotlight.

The next step was simply to punch out the paint swatches and categorise the circles into their colour families. Make sure that when you are selecting your colours, that you get at least a dozen different hues from each colour family.

Next I had to ready my frames. I bought four Ribba shadow box frames for $10 each at Ikea (they are 23cm x 23cm). You can get them in either black or white. For this project, I am using the black frame as I liked the contrast it has with nursery wall colour.

Ribba frames from Ikea - set me back $10 each.

The next stage was simply putting everything together. I already had some some glue tape in an applicator (you can get this from Spotlight or any craft store) to apply to the back of each circle cut out and simply overlayed each of the cirles in random colour order on a piece of white paper which I had traced the size of the frame window (the Ribba frames have a white mat around the edge of the window as you can see from the above pic).

Once I had finished gluing I put the paper with the cutouts face down on top of the mat and attached the backing - voila!

The finished product - yellow, green, blue and purple framed artwork.

All together it cost me about $12.50 per frame to complete this craft project, which is great. Now they just need to be mounted on the wall ready to be admired by our little one. It only took about 1/2 an hour to finish each artwork, so it was a pretty efficient project as well.

Weekend Warriors

The past week, we have had the most glorious winter weather, so we've been trying to get as many jobs around the house done as possible!

Last week Ben and his dad, Doug, spent the weekend in our front garden completing our landscaping. We wanted steps leading up to our front letterbox (which hasn't been built yet - this will be another weekend project) and we were originally thinking the steps would be constructed of treated timber and then stained.

However, we went for something different and decided on a timber sleeper/river rock combo and I think the results are fantastic. We used the leftover river rocks from the stairs around the edge of the garden bed, giving it a more natural feel than typical concrete edging that you usually see.


Timber sleeper/river rock stairs. Pack of four solar lights were picked up from Bunnings for $25 (we only used 3 here).

Leftover river rocks were used to line the garden bed at the front of the house.

The plants that we put in about six months ago are coming along.

It feels good to get jobs done. I don't know about you, but I love ticking things off a 'to do' list and this has been something we've been wanting to complete for a little while now, so it's fantastic that it is now done.

Next step, as mentioned, is to build and render a brick letterbox. We'll probably start sourcing materials for it this weekend and then lay the slab for it. After the yard is done, next step is the baby's nursery and I already have several projects (art and furniture) planned for this. Excitement!