Stage Two of Nesting Complete - Paint!

As I mentioned on Monday, I have been in that particular stage of pregnancy insanity where you must throw your entire household into upheaval and get everything ready for the baby. I beleive with Emma we got new wardrobes and I sewed everything in sight - wipes, change pads, baskets, wall organizers, quilts . . . I was a mad sewing demon. This time it appears to be painting and re-organizing.

I think I might have mentioned that we are switching all the bedrooms around. Since we were moving all the furniture anyway, and two of the bedrooms did not get painted when we moved in, and the third has been liberally sprinkled with Aaron's idea of wall art, I decided that there was no time like the present to paint. My long suffering husband agreed to wash walls and move furniture and peel tape, and gave me free reign to choose colours and paint walls.

Since I finished these rooms it has been snowing, and there is only pale, filtered light to see the new colours in, but I had to show them off in any case because I love them. When we were in Saskatchewan, I was always trying to pick paint colours that would liven things up and make our space more stimulating. In Montreal, I find that I am chosing colours that feel calm and happy as a foil to all the chaos and crowding (not to mention all that red brick).

Our room, formerly the boys' room, is at the front of the house, facing the street. It is this lovely moss-y, pine-y green. Dave and I both love it, and it feels so soothing to be in this room now.

And look, I even sort of made the bed for you (the duvet cover is in the laundry right now, and what with all the painting, the laundry is sadly neglected, so pardon all that white. I think I'm going to finally pull out my Freshcut fabric and make a wall quilt and possibly a bed quilt with it. And the fact that it has been re-issued and I could get more of a few prints I was missing or had used for other things helps, too.

Emma's room (formerly our shared room) was a neutral-y white colour with lots of handprints and wall art fromt he previous owner's kids. Yuk. Frankly, it has been driving me crazy for the last year and a half, and I have been itching to paint it, so I was happy to finally get the chance.

This room has no windows, just a sliding door joining it to the boys' room and the main door leading to the living room. It is pretty dark, and when I started applying this yellow-green paint I discovered that part of the reason for its sad, cavern-like feeling was that the former owners had painted it a neutral with a purple undertone. I totally do not get why you would put a cool, dark undertone in the paint of a dark room. In any case, this meant I had to add a second coat of paint, since there was this strange pink glow emmanating through the seemingly flourecent yellow at the end of my first coat.

The end result is a pretty, soft green that will be great to match with pink for now, but will have staying power for when Emma moves on from the pink thing. There was nothing in this roome except a giant, ugly, cheap Ikea wardrobe when I went to take this picture, so I thought I would show off the baby bump. Because this room has so little natural light, it is hard to photograph. The colour of the back wall is pretty accurate, but it is a little more yellow in real life.

The boys have been moved into the former study at the back of our bedrooms. They seem to have really taken to this room, and play in it a lot more than they did their former room. I think they maybe feel more secure because they are in the middle of the house rather than slightly isolate at the front of the house. They are still on their futon mattress, although plans are brewing to build them loft beds in the spring or summer.

The boys initially really wanted a similar colour to their old room, and this is pretty close. It is a little bit lighter, because there is less natural light at the back of our house (thanks, hill covered in tri-plexes on the other side of our back yard). Aaron decided once we had already bought the paint that he wanted grey instead, and then of course Andrew decided he would like red. We compromised and told them they could each pick a colour for their bed when Dave builds them.

Now that the painting is complete, we have started sorting and moving. Hopefully I'll be able to show you that next week, along with my finished Fab Doll Quilt, which has to be mailed in a week or so.

Hope you have a lovely weekend, and if you are in our area, find a way to enjoy the snow!

Still Waiting . . .

now at 40 weeks and counting. I think I still have two weeks left, but because I went into labour and then back out of it on Saturday and everyone in town heard about it, people are acting like I'm WAY overdue. The church ladies have got bored of waiting and have started sending food over anyway, and our answering machine message now says "You've reached the Chapmans. There is no baby yet. You may leave a message." For a day or so it said "You've reached the Chapmans. We are in the process of having a baby. If you want to leave the baby a large cash donation, please leave a message after the beep" because so many people were calling us, but we thought it might be inappropriate if, say, someone was calling about a dire-ly ill relative Dave had to go visit.

Yep, there I am. Not so cute anymore. Just very, very pregnant.

Its ironic, because last time around I had such a fast, sudden labour, and this time I've been having contractions on and off for days. Of course, I had a brutal cold when I was pregnant with Aaron, so I might have been so busy coughing that I didn't notice them. Or maybe I just coughed him right out. Not sure.

What has been arriving at a lovely rate, however, are my quilt blocks from the International Stash Busting Bee! I got a block Friday, two Monday, two Tuesday and one Wednesday. I sent out the big flowers, and look at all the beauty I received back:

If we have a girl, I may not have to go to much effort to make her a quilt after all.

Our little baby corner

Our house is kind of funny. We have three bedrooms upstairs and two downstairs. But between water seepage and evil cats, and terrible siding and thin carpets over concrete floors, our basement is not the nicest of places. Because we don't own the house, we're not really willing to spend the money it would take to make it better, so aside from getting rid of the evil cat and fixing the eaves troughs, we haven't done much. This means that although we have lots of theoretical space in our house, we don't have much bedroom space in practical terms. One room is Dave's study, and we like being able to close the door so that our books don't get spread all over the house and damaged and the bookshelves don't get climbed on. One room is the boys' room, and one is ours. When Aaron was born, the boys' room was only technically theirs -- they both still slept with us, and it just contained their clothes and the tv and the spare bed. But now, they actually sleep there, and the room is full of their stuff.

So, since we didn't want to move all Dave's stuff into the a-cursed basement (he hates our basement and it would make him very grumpy), and the baby will be sleeping with us anyway, I decided that we would take the horrible doors off our closet and use the corner it created for the baby's stuff.


Here it is: two hanging sweater organizers in lieu of drawers, a change table and some wall pockets.
The bottom of the change table has all the cloth diapers and covers, nicely organized in my new fabric baskets (with Aaron we used the make-piles-and-hope-they-don't-collapse-into-each-other method. It wasn't very effective). And the wall pockets will hold the snappis (the non-poky modern version of pins) and diaper cream and the like (with Aaron we used the line-it-up-along-the-edge-of-the-change-table-and-hope-it-doesn't-get-knocked-off method. Again, not terribly efficient at 3 am). Voila -- one changing station. I just need some creams and a bucket with a lid to act as a diaper pail and we're done.


I must say I am quite proud of these wall pockets. I made them based on the design in Handmade Home, Soulemama's second book. She suggests using a repurposed wool blanket, but I couldn't find one around town (land of polyester again) so I used a vintage pillowcase I found, which fits nicely and is just heavy enough. The pockets are bits of fabric from my stasth.



Andrew decided he wanted to help me applique the bird onto the one pocket, and I used my very rudimentry embroidery skills to stitch the word on the other.

So there you have it. Not Appartment Therapy, or Martha Stewart by any stretch of the imagination. But not bad for me, considering my general lack of decorating / organizing skills.

New wrap!

It should be obvious that every new baby needs their own new baby carrier. With Aaron, I found that I was not really fond of the pouch sling I was using, so I got a new, stretchy pouch sling instead or the canvas one I had started with.

For this baby, I decided that it was time to try a wrap. I love my sling, but every since I fractured my shoulder, I've found that I can only use the sling on my right shoulder for so long before it starts hurting. And that as baby gets bigger, I get a lot of tightness in my left hip from carrying the baby on that one hip so much. So I decided to get a wrap carrier for this new baby.

I got this one on etsy from Raspbery Baby . The price was good, and it looks like it is going to work out just fine. A lot cheaper than a Moby wrap, I tell you. I haven't checked out the instructional DVD yet. I guess I should do that soon. But then, if I don't get around to it before the baby comes, its not as if I won't have any way to carry him or her. I do have a few other carriers:

Cloth Wipes

This is my latest baby-related project (other than laundry). My wash cloths and wipes have gradually disappeared over time. I'm not sure where they've gone, but I've barely got enough to use for Aaron (who is still in diapers), never mind for another baby. So I took three old receiving blankets that were really too thin to be proper blankets anymore and cut them into 16ths. Then I followed the instructions in Handmade Home , and simply put the wrong sides together in pairs and zig-zag stitched them together.

I have 19 out of 24 done so far (each receiving blanket made 8 wipes). I cut these during an episode of Season 5 of Project Runway, and stitched them in the basement while the boys were playing. For the first part they were wrestling and playing "Three Stooges" (where they chase each other around going "woo woo woo woo woo nuk nuk nuk nuk"). Andrew was getting too aggressive, however (unfortunately the 3 Stooges are not very good role models) so I had to shut down that game. After a few moments of quiet, I discovered he had done this:

The wall and his brother also got decorated. I just reminded myself that he knows its washable, and that it was bound to happen eventually.