A few new things

There are a few new things ready to go in the baby's room...

First of all... I finally finished the DIY botanical pull down chart I was working on!  I must say... I am very happy with the way it turned out.  Here's the finished product...

So I've been seeing these great black background botanicals around the world wide web, and I think to myself "wouldn't one of those look really great in my house?"  I mean really... check out a few of these cool spaces...

Pure Style Home

The Everygirl

Design Sponge

Unfortunately, you need several hundred dollars to purchase one of these... not my kind of budget.  I will say, that ikea has a version that they sell (SIBBARED Picture) for $19.99... which is a great price, but I wanted something a little more one of a kind. 

Now this is where Vintage Printable came to the rescue.  Vintage Printable is a site that provides free, public domain/out of copyright images for people to download and print.  I've heard of people finding cool stuff on the site and printing/framing images to use as artwork, so I figured I might as well dig around to see if there was anything that could work.  Lo and behold, on this page  I found several images of black botanicals that were perfect for this little project of mine.  I decided to go with this one...

All I did was download the image, crop and resize the image in photoshop so that it would fit perfectly on a 24"x36" poster, uploaded my resized image onto Costco's site had it printed as a poster for $15.99.  I was really happy with the image quality-- it's a little bit grainy in some spots but it actually makes it look like an old vintage chart.

You could frame the poster if you wanted, but I decided to make mine look like a vintage-ish pull down chart since it was cheaper than buying a frame!  To do this I had Doug cut two strips of mdf for me 1" wide, 1/4" thick, and 26" long, I primed and spray painted them black, and then attached them to the top and bottom of the poster.  You could use wooden dowels, but I thought that using flat material would be easier to secure.  I used some heavy duty tape to initially attach the trim pieces to the top and bottom and then once I was happy with the way it looked I pulled out my hand stapler and secured it with a few well placed staples.  I attached a piece of hemp cord to the top with a few staples so that you can hang the poster from a nail.

I like it so much that I'm totally tempted to steal it out of the baby's room and put it somewhere else in the house... we'll see :)

And yesterday my moroccan pouf arrived!  As I mentioned earlier, I wasn't sure how it was going to look as I ordered the cheapest one I could source online.  But I've gotta tell you, I am super impressed with the quality.  It totally has the same look and feel as some more expensive options I've seen in a few local Vancouver stores but was several hundred dollars cheaper!  I also really like that it comes pre-stuffed.  There were a few sites selling unstuffed poufs but they all looked like they'd be a pain in the butt to stuff once it arrived.

If you're looking for an inexpensive moroccan pouf definitely check out Rugs USA.  They have tons of colours to chose from and make sure to look online for coupon codes-- I found one and scored an additional 10% off.  Rugs USA has super cheap shipping to Canada too, but I will warn any Canadian purchasers to be prepared to pay duty/taxes on delivery.  If I wasn't so stinkin' pregnant I would have had it shipped to Sumas and driven across the border to pick it up and hopefully saved on having to pay duty.  But, it WAS kind of nice to have it delivered to your front door :)  

Anyhow... those are two new things we've got going on in the nursery.  Oh, and there is one more new thing here in the house that I should show you... turns out the box used to ship the pouf was just as exciting as the contents...

It apparently makes a seriously awesome "puppee scool"  aka puppy school :)

Hours of fun I tell ya... hours of fun :)