Old to the New Navy

We are back from the Mile High City and let me tell you, traveling with toddlers is no easy undertaking!  We spent two hours on a bus and two and half hours on a plane, both ways.  I won’t go into details on the crazy but let’s just say we’ve sworn off major travel for severalllll months until there’s a little more independence amongst the toddlers in the fam and, therefore, a little more sanity amongst the adults.  ;)

So, moving on…

I’ve been drooling over these K & Elphy sandals for the girls:
 
[image via K & Elphy]

But, at $56 a pair, they’re way out of the park when it comes to our tiny budget.

So, armed with a gift card I’ve had since Christmas, I bought a couple of pairs of these from Old Navy:

[image via Old Navy] 
With a 30% discount code, I got them for about $11 each.  The thing about them though is that, while they’re cute with the fabric flowers, I feel like they’re a little too top heavy and being that the flowers are very notneutral colors, I’d have a hard time pairing them with every outfit I bedeck the girls in.  So, I bought them with the intention to change things up a little. 

And change them I did…


  A little bit different than how they came packaged, right?  Improvisation at it’s finest.  When I can’t have the ones I really want, I get them in a slightly different way. 

I was 90% sure I could take the flowers off the sandals when ordering them since I removed the bows off these shoes last year pretty easily and I was right.  All I had to do was remove the stitches holding the flowers on using a seam ripper.

See the stitches?

The stitching around the outside of the bottom of the felt piece holding the flower on was the same color as the stitching along the faux leather sides of the t-strap (does that make any sense?) so I had to be really careful that what I was ripping was the flower stitching and not the actual stitching holding the shoe together.

One down, one to go:
 
The flowers will make some cute headbands or clips sometime in the future.  :)

After I had both flowers off, I measured the t-strap into six even sections and painted those sections starting with white.  I didn’t paint the very top of the t-strap, where it meets the top strap, for no reason other than just because.  I just stuck to painting inside the stitching on the strap.

When the white was dry, I went in and painted on the black.  I used regular acrylic paint so the paint dried pretty fast and I was able to get both shoes done in about 20 minutes.  Originally I was going to use puff paint so you wouldn’t be able to see the tiny holes left behind from the stitching but the paint filled them in pretty well and I’m really loving the matte finish of the acrylic so we’ll see how it holds up in the long run.  So far, so good!

I love how they turned out!  Anthony isn’t the biggest fan of them but I’m hoping they’ll grow on him.  :) 


(Side note:  Old Navy also has these sandals which, if you painted the front strap, would imitate the K & Elphy’s even more but I wasn’t sure if paint would stick to the patent faux leather so I went with the t-straps instead.)

I took the girls outside in the rain this morning to grab the ‘after’ pictures and caught more than I needed so it’s only makes sense to share them.  I don’t like black and white stripes at all apparently…



My bribe of “I’ll let you hold my umbrella” was a winner and they leapt out the door to do so. 


 

Oh and their scarves!  I debuted them to Instagram a couple of weeks ago but I might as well give the low down here since this is supposedly a DIY blog or something…  I found this long-sleeved tee on clearance (I found it for 70% off in-store but click the link to find it 50% off online!) at Target last month and knew it’d make great infinity scarves for the girls.  I grabbed the biggest size they had.  To get the scarves out of it, I first cut off the top portion by cutting off the bottom of the tee right under each armpit.  Then I cut the big square that gave me down the middle so I had two halves of the bottom of the tee. 


Placing the right sides of fabric together for each piece, I sewed the two cut sides together and that’s it!  You could totally do this with no-sew tape too – see this tutorial.  Since it’s cotton, I didn’t hem the top (the bottom was already hemmed since it was the bottom of the tee) because it won’t fray.



I’m kinda wishing I’d have gotten another for myself!  :)

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I hope it’s nicer in your neck of the woods than it is in ours.  Our forecast shows nothing but rain and thunderstorms for the next five days and that just makes this moms cabin fever warning siren go off loud and clear.  The last time I took the kids out in the rain I lost my car keys so I’m going to pretend I learned from that mistake and stay inside the casa…until desperation plays devil’s advocate and I suddenly find myself and the kids wandering those dangerous-to-the-wallet aisles of Target…  ;)

Kisses to you and yours!  :*

Baby’s Own B&B

I consider myself a pretty punctual person.  Actually, I really hate being late and, until I had kids and time just slips away into the abyss when you’re getting them and yourself ready, I rarely ever was.  But, like I said, kids can throw a wrench into that agenda.  This doesn’t just go for getting from place to place but it goes for the blog as well.  We’re going to dig back a year for this little post.  Remember this Jenny Lind changing table we bought at a thrift store for $14?


Well we turned it into a co-sleeper in the week before Sebastian was born...Anthony’s dad was here and literally put in the last few screws the day before we came home with our first little guy.  It became his very own Bed & Breakfast – bed since, obviously, and breakfast because his food source, me, was right there next to him and at his beck and call.

We originally wanted to just buy a co-sleeper like this Arm’s Reach one (we borrowed a friend’s when we had the girls) but we didn’t want to spend the money to do so at the time and I couldn’t find a good used one anywhere.  It’s okay though because I love this one 10384 times more than the manufactured ones.

Unfortunately, since it was a last minute project and I was 40 weeks pregnant at the time we were building/refashioning it, I did a horrible job at documenting the process!  So sorry!  I’ll try to explain things as best I can in case you want to take on a Jenny Lind switcheroo yourself!  If you have any questions about the process that I don’t answer in the post, always feel free to email me (beaninlove@gmail.com)!  :)

The changing table itself was in pretty good condition.  It had been painted the periwinkle color and some of that paint was coming off in spots but it wasn’t a big deal since we were going to repaint it anyway.  The first thing we had to do though was get what would be the bed part level with the top of our mattress.  We figured out that if we just cut off the bottom legs completely, it’d be the exact height we needed it to be.  That meant that the bottom shelf would sit directly on the floor which made the whole contraption very stable.  The next thing we did was rebuild the top part of the table.  We removed the rails and spindles there and filled in all the holes left with wood filler.  Then Anthony built a three-sided frame with some narrow pieces of wood on the three sides that wouldn’t be up against our bed.  After all that was finished, he took it outside, sanded it down lightly, wiped it down, and gave it a coat of spray primer followed by a coat of white spray paint.  We let it sit outside in the unusually mild December weather to gas off for a couple of days.


We wanted to add a mesh layer around the top frame for extra security and so Sebastian could still use the co-sleeper when he learned to roll over.  I had a hard time finding mesh like the mesh they use on the top of actual co-sleepers so I just bought some strong white tulle from Walmart and Anthony stapled it around the top frame. 
Except when he was finished it looked really shoddy and was really rippled and so we ended up removing it.  It was tough to staple it on and make sure everything was straight and tight so we’ll figure out another way to either add some extra rails or mesh for the next kid.  For the time being, we used this co-sleeper up until the first sign of rolling over and then to the crib, Sebastian went.

To the two shelves below the sleeper, I added a gray and white geometric fabric I found at Hobby Lobby (here is the same fabric at fabric.com).  I made a simple template by taping together several sheets of computer paper I laid next to each other atop one shelf and used that large piece to trace and cut out the fabric shelf liner.  I attached the fabric with glue; several small dots of fabric glue placed every six or so inches around the shelf perimeter did the trick.
 

I also used the shelf template I made to cut out a mattress, made from some three-inch foam we bought at JoAnn Fabrics.

  

Last, I whipped up a little fitted sheet I made out of a queen-sized sheet I found at Dirt Cheap for $3 that matched my shelf liner fabric (tutorial here).  I laid a waterproof mattress cover (from Babies ‘R Us”) over the foam mattress and put the sheet over that so that if our spitter spit up on his bed, it wouldn’t soak down into the difficult-to-clean foam.

Here’s the co-sleeper in action (minus the now one-year-old baby):


When I posted the after picture at the beginning of this post on Instagram, there was a little confusion about how it worked and I even received some emails questioning how safe it was.  Yeah.  My bad for posting it away from the bed when in reality, that’s where it belongs.  Hopefully this clears up all that confusion and those who were concerned about Sebastian’s safety can rest in peace knowing we don’t intentionally endanger our kids.  :)

 
We actually moved my nightstand over and slid the co-sleeper all the way up to the wall when we used it.  That way, I was face-to-face with him and didn’t have to sit up and bend over to see what he was or wasn’t up to.  Also, everything that Sebastian owned was stowed in baskets underneath on the co-sleeper shelves which was awesome.  Since he didn’t yet have a room to call his own, it was great that he at least had one space where we could store all his stuff.
 
Since it was the dead of winter when he was born and I needed blankets, I also tucked the comforter and sheets that were in the way between the mattress and the co-sleeper so that they wouldn’t somehow end up over Sebastian.

I think for our next kid we’re going to do a little reworking with the top frame since the netting didn’t work out.  I’m not sure how that’ll all go down yet but we’ll add a few more rails in there probably.  I know it looks like there’s a good amount of space in between the two top horizontal rails but you’d be hard pressed to fit a newborn through that space and, like I mentioned above, we only used the co-sleeper until the first signs of rolling over happened, then it was to the crib he went.

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Update:  When our fourth kid, Gianna, came along, I whipped up some fabric straps that I tied along the top of the co-sleeper frame. 

But back to the original post…

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I borrowed a model for effect:


I hauled this thing from Sebastian’s room, where it’s been sitting for the past year, into our room for pictures and then hauled it back into his room and now it sits in his closet and serves as extra shelving which works perfectly!  In use even when it’s not being used for its intended purpose!  I like those kinds of things.  :)

One last before and after:

I’ve been seeing lots of Jenny Lind changing tables like this one all over second-hand sites so if you’re looking for a great co-sleeping option, you should take a stab at this one!  If and when we rework the top of our sleeper, I promise to write up a full tutorial!

Happy Monday!

Infinite Nursing

That’s kinda what you get when an infinity scarf doubles as a nursing cover, right?  Or maybe I’m just confused with what nursing sometimes feels like.  And maybe those feelings are taking me back to nursing the twins at which time it did seem like I spent infinite amount of time nursing.  And maybe I’m just getting way off track here.  Focus. 

Right.

A few months ago I was strolling the clearance area of our local Hancock Fabrics when I spotted this striped jersey knit, marked at $3:
 
It was about a yard of fabric, 60” wide, a deep olive and white (though it looks black in the pictures), and I scooped it up because I can’t say no to oh-so-soft stripes.  A couple of days later I turned it into a nursing cover/infinity scarf and this is the story of how I did it.

First I squared off the fabric.  The long edges were cut a little quirky so all I had to do was cut along the stripes/sides to get a nice straight edge.  See the crooked edge before?

A cut along the lines made everything much better.
 
If you’re working with a non-striped pattern, using a cutting mat or a squared edge will help you get straight, 90 degree edges.

Now I had a big rectangle of fabric measuring 36” x 60”; the two shorter ends were the factory-cut edges (or selvage edges) and the longer edges were the store-cut ones/the ones I evened out.  Since the fabric was jersey and wouldn’t fray, I just left these outside, long edges alone after they were cut; no hemming.  To get the infinity scarf, I sewed the two short edges together.  However, this could easily be done minus the sewing with some no-sew tape.  Here’s how:

The No-Sew Version

Place a long piece of no-sew tape along the short edge of your scarf (I used some white ribbon just for a visual).
 

Making sure your long piece of fabric isn’t twisted somewhere in the middle, bring your other short edge over and lay it on top of the sewing tape.  Your fabric should be laying flat and should be a large tube.  Make sense?

Last, using the steam option on your iron, iron down those two, overlapping ends.  The no-sew tape will do its magic and make those ends stick together and you’ll be good to go!
 


The Sewn Version

If you decide to sew your edges together, simply overlap them a half inch or so and pin them together.
 

No need to fold anything; the jersey won’t fray.
 

Then sew a straight stitch right along your overlapping layers, making sure to backstitch at each end and that’s it!    
I wear the seam at the back so it’s not noticeable at all.

No baby:

I couldn’t decide which shoes to wear…
 

Baby:


And I was going to crop this one but then I just couldn’t because it’s kinda the story of my life – I sit down to nurse and somebody has to go.
 

What’re you lookin’ at?

Here’s the funny thing about this little project, I was so excited to share this with you guys a couple of months ago when I made it because I really thought this infinity scarf/nursing cover was a genius idea and I thought I was the first to discover it but alas, there are those who have been there, done that.  :)  So great though because, if you don’t feel like making your own, you can find them at these fine shops:

Hold Me Close

Nursing Time

Three 4 Design

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Happy TGIalmostF

Goldie Toes Jr.

Bethany made me do it.  Okay.  Maybe it was my own fault, especially since I’m now a repeat offender.  Paint, you guys.  It makes the old new and the new old and the boring fun.  Take for instance, these shoes:I bought both of them secondhand for $3.50 each awhile back.  So cute for cheap, right?  The pandas had the girls at hello but the pink?  The pom on the toe, while it was cute, needed to hop on the next plane back to Whoville….making these little shoes the perfect specimens for some cap toeing.

So, for starters, after I got the pom off the front of each (I just used a seam ripper), I gathered my supplies – a paint brush, some painters’ tape, and gold paint (I love my Martha metallic gold!). 
   

Then I taped off the fronts where I’d be painting the toe.

Last, I painted the toe and ripped the tape off right after I was done, while the paint was still wet.
(I went back in later and pulled out those leftover threads you can see in the above pic when I was done and touched up the paint.  Also, the paint I used dries a lot more metallic than it looks when it’s wet.)

The shoes have a strap, as you probably noticed, but the girls can get them on easier by themselves without using the strap and the shoes stay on great without it, so I ended up just cutting it out a few weeks ago. 

I did this one day in the five minute time span I have between giving the girls their lunch and them yelling “all done” (little bro was napping).  It was so simple!


Top >> Kohl’s,  Cords >> Thrifted (Old Navy), Sweater >> mine from Rue 21 (XS on me, XL on her :p  ), Beanie >> mine  

I love them because they go with pretty much everything the girls own.  And did I mention that I painted these a few months ago?  I’m so behind on posts y’all.  Point is, they still look awesome and they’ve probably been worn over 30 times outside of the house on one twinkle toe or another.

Soooo, any card-carrying shoe painters out there?  What about other random items?  Profess the power of paint!