DIY Goodies | It's Great To Be Home

How to Sew a No-Fail Crib Skirt

April 19, 2012 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 10 Comments

With less than 3 weeks to spare, the nursery is finally almost finished!! Can I get a heck yeah?

A project that I was kind of dreading was sewing the crib skirt – it sounded hard! I pinned a few tutorials but never really got up the nerve to read them, and then finally just decided to jump in head first and see what happened. Luckily, it turned out to be one of the quickest and easiest projects I’ve done!

Without further adieu . . .

Assemble your supplies:

- 3 yards of fabric for the crib skirt, pre-washed and ironed (you could use less fabric if you wanted to piece the skirt together, but making it easy on yourself is part of the “no-fail” concept of this skirt!)

- measuring tape

- iron and ironing board

- scissors

- 10 feet of thin grosgrain ribbon

- pins

- 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper (optional – you could just use your measuring tape, but I’m lazy)

- pencil

- sewing machine and thread (optional – you could use fabric glue or fusible webbing if you prefer)

Step 1: Take all the measurements for your crib skirt. You’ll need to write down the following measurements:

To get the width of your crib skirt, add together all of the horizontal measurements (i.e., the 3 sides of the crib). Then add 1-2 inches to that measurement to allow for hemming. For me, those measurements looked like this:

27.5 inches + 51.5 inches + 27.5 inches = 106.5 inches

+ 1.5 inches for hemming = 108 inches total*

*I had 3 yards of fabric which equals 108 inches of length, so I decided to add 1.5 inches for hemming so that I could just cut a strip from the length of my 3 yards of fabric instead of piecing together 3 sections of fabric (make sense?).

To get the height of your crib skirt, start with the vertical measurements that you took of the space between the bottom crib rail and the crib mattress. To make a more modern crib skirt that covers only that space, just add 2-3 inches to your measurement to allow for hemming. My measurement was 9 inches + 2 inches = 11 inches. If you’d like a longer crib skirt that touches the floor, you’ll need to measure the space between the crib mattress and the floor, then add 2-3 inches for hemming.

Step 2: Measure and cut your fabric to size. This was an easy part for me. My final measurements came out to 108 inches (3 yards) x 11 inches, so I just used a sheet of 8.5 x 11 typing paper to make a pencil line exactly 11 inches from the finished edge of my fabric down the entire length of my 3 yards of fabric.

Next, just cut along your pencil line and you will have the fabric piece for your crib skirt!

Step 3: Iron in your hem. I chose to do pretty skinny hems to maximize my fabric, so I folded over each edge by about 1/4 inch and ironed in a crease, then folded each edge a second time by 1/4 inch and ironed in the crease. (And since one of my edges was the finished edge of the fabric, I only had to hem 3 sides – score!)

Step 4: Add your ribbon ties. I came across Anything Pretty’s idea for using ribbon to tie the crib skirt to the crib mattress and I thought it was brilliant, so I decided to do the same thing (it works great!). I cut 12 10-inch lengths of grosgrain ribbon in a color that coordinated with my fabric and then just spaced them out using my trusty sheet of typing paper, pinning them into the hem on one of the long sides of the crib skirt.

Here’s how it looked after all the ribbons were pinned in place (be sure your ribbons are folded in half, with the pin in the folded part of the ribbon).

Step 5: Sew in your hem and ribbons. If you don’t like to sew, you can use fabric glue or fusible webbing to secure your hem and ribbons instead of sewing them into place. I opted to sew them because (a) it was easy, and (b) I knew I would be washing this crib skirt from time to time so I wanted to be confident that it wouldn’t fall apart.

Tip: Sew back and forth over each ribbon tie a few times to make sure it’s really secure. On my machine, I just push this little button and the machine sews in reverse.

Step 6: Tie on the crib skirt! Just finagle the ribbons as necessary around the springs and supports until your crib skirt hangs evenly and fairly smoothly along the 3 sides of the crib.

No more naked space! And you can readjust the ribbon ties as you lower the crib mattress when baby gets older.

Seeing little peeks of the animal fabric makes me happy. :)

Easy, right? Truly, this is a no-fail crib skirt – I don’t think there’s any way to screw it up! Let me know if you try this project, I’d love to hear how it turns out. :)

This Post Brought To You By Custom Homes Calgary.

Hanging Poufs in the Nursery

April 6, 2012 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 10 Comments

One more nursery project has been crossed off the list!

While the rest of the room may still be a disaster, at least the upper right-hand corner of the nursery ceiling is looking spiffy. :)

I knew I wanted to hang tissue paper poufs in the nursery ever since I fell in love with this image:

And I also knew that poufs had to be a part of the awesome baby shower thrown by my mom and two friends a few weekends ago:

So lucky me, I got to be the recipient of a jillion pink poufs once the shower was over!!

My mom actually made me two more poufs that I haven’t had a chance to hang yet – but I know they’re going to look awesome and fit right in with the rest of their friends. :)

Hanging them was insanely easy – I just used a clear thumbtack and fishing line (which my mom had already attached to the poufs) and used my fingers to push the tacks into the ceiling. See?

I also have lots of little poufs that look just like the ones used in the mobile (sold by Etsy seller Party Poms) below:

I’m thinking of using them to make my own mobile, probably for over the crib, but I’m worried that it might be pouf overload. Or maybe you can never have too many poufs? Deep thoughts.

This Post Brought To You By Basement Development Calgary.

How to Turn Your Jeans Into “Skinny” Jeans (Works For Maternity Jeans, Too!)

January 31, 2012 By Liz - It's Great To Be Home 11 Comments

For the longest time I resisted the skinny jean trend – but once I took the plunge I was totally hooked! Now I love them with flats, but especially in the winter tucked into boots – such a cute look, don’t you think?

Well, now that I am 26 weeks along and fully in the “I can only fit into maternity pants” phase of my pregnancy, I’ve been especially smitten with skinny jeans. Their tailored silhouette makes me feel less shapeless, and that makes me happy. :)

The problem is that almost all of the maternity pants that fit me well happen to have flared or bootcut legs – which doesn’t work with my whole goal of trying to balance a growing belly by throwing people off with my skinny ankles. So I decided to turn my maternity jeans into skinny jeans!

I turned to Pinterest for inspiration (of course) and came up with two great tutorials – this one from Lucky Design, and this one from Holy Craft. My favorite was the one from Lucky Design, so I used that tutorial as a jumping off point for my own sewing extravaganza.

Here’s how it all went down:

Supplies Needed:

- pair of jeans or pants that you want to skinny-fy

- pair of skinny jeans that you like the way they fit

- 2 colors of chalk (if your pants are dark), fabric pen, marker, whatever floats your boat

- ruler

- pins

- scissors

- sewing machine

- thread in a color that matches your pants

Step 1: Turn both pairs of jeans inside out, then lay the skinny pair on top of the regular pair. Line up the two pairs of pants at the inside seam like in the photo below (this assumes that the outside seam is thinner than the inside seam on your pair of jeans). Make sure that all of your fabric is flat and that there aren’t any weird wrinkles.

Step 2: Take your chalk and mark a line at the edge of your skinny jeans – the chalk line should be made on your regular jeans. Do this with both legs.

Step 3: Use a ruler to make sure that the chalk lines are in the same place on both legs. First measure the distance from the chalk line to the outside edge of your pants, then measure the length of the chalk line, then measure the distance from the bottom of the outside seam to where the chalk meets the outside seam. (That sounds kind of confusing, so let me know in the Comments if you need clarification.) These measurements should be the same on both legs, and this will ensure that one leg doesn’t turn out totally different from the other leg.

Step 4: Use a new color of chalk to make any necessary adjustments to your chalk line. Your ruler may come in handy as a straight edge.

Step 5: Use your pins to pin the two sides of the pant leg together along the new chalk line. Make sure that you don’t pull the fabric when you’re doing this!

Step 6: Use your sewing machine to sew a straight stitch along the new chalk line. You can reinforce the beginning and end of each new seam by either using the “reverse” button on your machine or by picking up your needle and sewing over the beginning/end of the seam again.

Step 7: Try on your jeans to make sure they’re fitting how you want them to! Make any adjustments now – this is a “do as I say, not as I do” moment because I had a little wonky wrinkle at each knee where the new seam met the old seam but I told myself that it was fine and moved on. :)

Step 8: Cut off the extra fabric on the outside of your new seam, leaving some excess. You will need enough excess fabric for a zigzag stitch to fit comfortably without sewing past your seam and onto the pant leg. I cut it a bit too close on my first pair so I left more excess on the second pair and I was much happier. I would err on the side of leaving on too much excess (but no more than 1/2 inch) – you won’t notice it when you’re wearing the jeans.

Step 9: Practice your zigzag stitch on a scrap piece of fabric. Most of you can probably skip this step but I had never used a zigzag stitch so I wanted to practice a little bit before I started sewing away on my pants. I chose a triple zigzag stitch instead of a regular zigzag stitch because I thought it would be better for the thread to pass through the fabric three times per stitch instead of just one (I don’t know if that’s really true, it just seemed to make sense).

I drew a chalk line on my scrap fabric so that I could see exactly where the zigzag stitches would fall in relation to my seam.

By the way, I haven’t washed and dried my new skinny jeans yet so I can’t swear that this zigzag stitch trick is 100% foolproof. You could also serge the seam or use a fray check on the raw edge instead.

Step 9: Sew a zigzag stitch along the entire length of your new seam.

Step 10: Try on your new skinny jeans!!! I’m just warning you – you will probably want to wear them for the next 6 days straight. Not that I’m doing that or anything. :)

I did this with a pair of black maternity jeans as well as a pair of dark gray corduroy maternity jeans – I didn’t have any problems with the corduroy, and the fact that they were maternity pants didn’t seem to make any difference either.

I have plans to do this with at least 3 other pairs of pants (once I fit back into my regular clothes) – I’m so excited!! And I have to know – are any of you other preggos finding that skinny jeans make you feel a little more at ease with your growing belly?

Now go forth and skinny-fy!!