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Project Nursery: No Sew Fabric Pennant

June 20, 2011

Hope you had a great weekend with all of the dads and granddads in your life! I hope to post a few photos of ours soon.

Crossing my fingers you haven’t seen enough of it… but I wanted to revisit a little project that you might have spotted during the nursery reveal – it’s easy to miss in the larger room photos but here’s a close up.

I’ve been looking for creative ways to incorporate the remaining fabrics from the initial nursery fabric selection (and here’s the line up before we knew whether we were having a boy or girl) from over 4 months ago, and I thought a little set of pennants (or flags) would be a great way to introduce different fun patterns while staying within the room’s color palette.

To keep the project short and simple, I turned to my trusty no sew hem tape. One hour later and the pennant strand went from squares of extra fabric to finished!

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No Sew Fabric Pennants

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Materials: Fabric remnants, no sew hem tape, iron and ironing board, scissors, ribbon the length of your final set of ‘flags’

{1.} Cut triangles (two long even sides, one short top) out of fabric, keep in mind the size of each hem and cut your triangles roughly 1/2″ wider on each side.

{2.} Fold each side of the triangle creating a 1/2″ hem, iron to create a crease that stays put. Tempting as it may be, don’t skip over this step – it makes adhering the hem tape and creating a clean, straight edge for your pennants 10x easier.

{3.} Use hem tape to line the inside of the two longer portions of the triangle, apply heat of the iron for at least 10 seconds to each side (moving iron back and form slowly over crease) to create a permanent adhesive. The bottom corner of the two longest sides may require a bit of layering of the hems to look even. Leave the top hem open.

{4.} Once each flag or pennant has been ironed and hemmed (on the two longer sides of the triangle), line up pennants along your ribbon to create your pattern layout. Flip over (you may want to mirror your trial run exactly or you may be fine with giving each single pennant a direct face as I did below) and line the ribbon up along the top edge of each pennant.

{5.} Snip extra corner pieces for a clean look.

{6.} With each pennant individually, fold the previously created top crease (step 2) over the ribbon so that the fabric crease now sandwiches the ribbon in place. Add hem tape to each side of ribbon and press with an iron. Repeat for each pennant moving slowly down the ribbon.

{5.} Now that each pennant is secured to the ribbon, flip over and hang!

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Really really love how it turned out! It also looks adorable tied to the front of the crib and will make a great addition to a birthday party or other event one day.

Fabric pennants are a really easy way to use up remnants of fabric that you have left over from other projects, and with hem tape it takes just an hour or so to iron together a short little line of adorable flags.

More Project Nursery posts and tutorials over here.

Now really, truly, honestly back to focusing on other rooms in the house :), big sigh of relief for those of you who are done with seeing every angle of this space!

Birds of a Feather…

June 16, 2011

…flock together. Well – maybe not of a feather. These little buddies are more of the cast iron variety. I spotted them a while back and thought they were so cool and would be a nice little addition for the new kitchen.

Kitchen iron birds 1

But when I couldn’t find the sourcing information after searching for everything ‘iron’, ‘bird’, ‘oil rubbed bronze’ — you name it on Google, I eventually let them go and forgot about them.

Then a couple of weeks ago I came across the pair on HomeDecorators.com for $19 and nabbed ’em quicker than you can say ‘new-birds-for-the-kitchen’. I think I spotted something similar a while back at Pottery Barn for $70+ and recently a different version at West Elm for $20 each.

There’s just something quirky and special about this little pair, and while I won’t use them as votive candle holders (as they’re shown above), I love how they peer over the kitchen from their corner perch.

Sort of a Where’s Waldo but for iron birds – can you spot them?

Here’s a close up:

A picture from a taller vantage point would be nice, I should have stood on a stool. These short legs only offer so much.

Kitchen decor - new iron birds 2

Here we go, here’s a higher angle. I didn’t think Kevin would notice but he walked in just as I was opening the delivery box. When he said ‘Sweet birds’, I knew that they had found their home. Yay for rediscovering a favorite find!

Office Makeover: Back in Action!

June 15, 2011

Now that the nursery is finished and Liv has a comfy room to sleep in and plenty of play space to explore, it’s time to get back to the office/guest room makeover (man oh man are kitchen barstools not a comfortable place to work on your computer all day!).

Last time we left this space, just before Christmas, we were working on projects like this:

Demo time! We were hoping that we might be able to squeak out a new office/guest room before Liv joined us (not a completely furnished space – just a bare room would do) and before you knew it the entire room had been torn to shreds.

Here’s a quick recap on the tiny bedroom and old kitchen space before demo (actually, before we moved in). You can see in the top sledgehammer photo that we painted the little bedroom a neutral tan and used the paneled walls to create a chair rail look, and that’s how it lived for the first two and a half years. But for a more dramatic before and after, these are the two rooms that are now the office at the time we purchased the home:

Kevin worked for about two weeks over Christmas and New Years to bring down the wall between the two rooms and to clear out the entire space.

You can see from above that we had made a few changes to the old kitchen after we moved in as well, such as painting the walls a soft green and staining the older cabinets a dark espresso. We also changed out the hardware and added a jute window shade where a valence had once hung.

When family came to town for Christmas, this is what they were met with. They’re used to construction around here but boy was the inside of this room dirty! We attempted to tape it off to the outside world but there wasn’t much to be down to hide the elephant in the room.

The smashed drywall and extra dust didn’t have much time to settle in, and just before Liv’s arrival on January 9 we were able to clear the extra debris out of the room so that it looked a bit more like this:

And then Liv was here! And the office makeover rested as-is for several long months… Kevin went back to school, we all got to know beautiful baby and we started working on the new guest bathroom after the-best-email-ever arrived.

But the office is back! We’re diving into it as we speak (doing double duty on the office/guest room and the new bathroom) and today the office looks a bit cleaner from the outside:

Her framed walls are now covered in hardibacker and plaster, they have the slight ‘Spanish texture’ applied and they’re painted the same Buzz Brown as the kitchen (which is just behind me in this picture.) Even the ceiling with its previously open attic access (left over from installing the new AC/heater) is all closed up with a new attic door and a coat of white paint.

Now you’re all caught up to where we’ve left off. I’m so excited for this new space! and doubly excited to move my home office from the kitchen island into an organized room.

For more Office Makeover posts, check out: desking hunting for under $300, bookcases under $300, inspirational rooms, room layout options, demo part 1 & demo part 2.