Projects

  Let me start by saying that it was very hard for me to pick the colors and Bedding for Oliver’s room…boys don’t have a lot of options!! I even started to love a girls bedding soooo much that I thought, “I will make it work” it has just a little pink ;) Daddy said NO WAY! I am glad he did!!… But if I ever have a little girl I already have everything picked out for her room!! :) I tried to “design” my own bedding on a webpage but after weeks I kept changing my mind until daddy said that if I didn’t order the bedding like in the next 24 hrs he was going to do it and pick whatever he wanted!!! (Yes it was that bad my indecision) so thank God I went to Cadenlane.com and there it was… Oliver’s Bedding! I knew that after getting the bedding everything else was going to come together… and it did… we picked the wall and furniture color from the bedding… daddy painted the furniture (not the crib) and I started ordering on etsy pretty much all the decorations!! Everything got done pretty much like 2 weeks ago!!! I kept adding things after Oliver was born and now is finally done and we love it! I hope you will too! Almost forgot! The gray squirrel represents our dog Cronin (his brother from another mother) a Miniature Schnauzer! He loves to chase squirrels and the 2 owls are mommy and daddy… we tell that to Oliver :)   

We originally weren’t going to find out the gender of out little one, so we set out for a gender neutral room at first.  Then, we buckled and opened our sonogram to find out we’re having a boy!  Needless to say, we tried to stay true to gender neutrality but it’s hard knowing a little boy will grow up in there! I really dislike themes, matching sets, and spending a ton of money on furniture that has a short lifespan.  We bought all the furniture used, I sewed everything in the room except the quilt hanging on the crib – which my mom made for us.  All in all, we created a room that we love for less than $300.  The best part, most of these items will be re-purposed/reused as he grows.

If you want to throw a party for a special friend of yours to celebrate a second or third child into their family, throw them a “Sprinkle”.  It is not technically a shower since you don’t play games and shower the guest of honor with items she’ll need for baby.  Instead you throw a sprinkle luncheon or cocktail party and sprinkle her with gifts for herself for fun non-practical but adorable gifts for baby.

We had a really hard time finding crib sets that were gender neutral, and I knew I didn’t want to use brown at all. I really fell in love with these shades of teal/turquoise/aqua, so I knew I wanted to incorporate that into the nursery. We decided to paint the walls two shades of grey, separated by a white chair rail. We added the orange/yellow artwork to include a splash of more vibrate color. I think I will still add some poms to the ceiling on the crib side to balance it out a bit.

We wanted to have a gender neutral nursery since we did not find out the sex of our baby before birth. However, we also wanted to have something colorful – going beyond your standard beiges, greens and yellows. We found this to be very hard to find examples of that didn’t skew too much boy or girl. Then I saw the Skip Hop bedding and knew it was the perfect color palette for our colorful nursery. We used a slightly lighter shade of the blue found in the bedding as the wall color. We love blue for boys or girls. To balance out the intensity of the blue, we opted for a significant amount of white in the rest of the room to keep a bright, light feel.

For my daughter’s 2nd birthday we decided to go with her 2 favorite things as a theme: Olivia the Pig and Art!

When my nieces moved to a new house, I wanted to give them a room that could grow with them from little girl to preteen. The older girl wanted a jungle room and the younger wanted a princess theme, so I compromised with an enchanted forest with a faerie tale castle in the clouds and jungle animals lounging in the “trees.” I used muted colors to avoid the cartoon-y look children’s murals can get, and used abstracted shapes instead of fully realized forms. You can see the entire transformation from 1980s wallpapered duck room to its current state here: http://hadesarrow.com/blog/2011/03/14/nice-niece-bedroom

My daughter’s colorful room.  Too bad she refuses to sleep there.  I guess you don’t always know these things before hand!  :-P

A sweet nursery to grow with my little girl

We wanted a nursery that could convert to a little girl’s room. We also wanted a gender neutral room that could be changed slightly to fit her age as she grows.

This lovely event was a baby shower for a client who is in love with all things from the traditional Alice in Wonderland movie.  We focused on the tea party  and went with a vintage feel. 

We wanted a sanctuary more than a nursery. Somewhere that we would feel relaxed and want to be as well as a room that our daughter could grow into. It’s more of a grown up little girls room than a baby nursery and we couldn’t love it more!

We really wanted a modern gender neutral nursery for our baby.  I chose all of the fabric before we found out what we were having, but did end up adding just a couple splashes of pink in the frame collage after we found out we are having a girl!  I think this is a room she will really be able to grow into.

A birthday party at home using strawberries in a vintage, homespun, farm-chic sort of way!

A wild…sweet…fun baby’s first birthday party. Turned your regular pink and black Wild safari colors into a more fun colorful and bright idea for my daughter’s first birthday.

We wanted a mix of fun, modern, vintage, and funky! With twins on the way, we didn’t want to go overboard on costs, so we re used a lot of materials. Jenny Lind crib was the best purchase, bedding custom made on Etsy, and a chalkboard wall with signatures from family and friends!

I wanted so bad to have a grey and white with hints of green robot nursery for my daughter, it proved almost impossible to find girly robots so I went with (SHOCK AND HORROR!) bright colors! I didn’t find a bedding I liked so I had some custom made and hand painted the artwork drawing inspiration from a pillow I had received from my mother in South Africa

Im still not quite done, I need a rug – Id like a trellis pink and white, but mostly Ive gone with the woodland/enchanted forest theme throwing in a few owls, deers and gnomes for whimsy :-) It took me 8 hours o hand draw and paint the birch tree walls – white on beige.

For this party we wanted the dessert table to be reminiscent of a bakery in Paris. We choose macaroons of course! as well as a cake in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, decadent cupcakes, and yummy macaroons. We even dressed the birthday girl in a darling tiered tutu dress topped with a ornate custom head piece. A ornate frame held a custom sign made for the birthday girl and was center stage for her beautiful dessert table.