gimmeakiss*: Nursery Art: Part 2

Remember when I told you that the bunting for my shower was made from scraps from another project? Well, the time has come to reveal why I bought all that fabric in the first place...

I made an embroidery hoop display to hang over the changing table! Much like the tea towel calendar, I wanted something soft and lightweight on the wall in case some super squirming causes things to fall down.

First I hit up the fabric store searching for fat quarters and boy was I picky! The fabrics had to be gender neutral, have coordinating color palettes, have a consistent level of "busy-ness" and all live up to my insanely high standards. In the end I found a beautiful collection of fabrics - I am loving all the ways I have managed to use pattern mixing in the nursery.

Creating this project could not have been easier. I bought 7 inexpensive wood embroidery hoops from a craft store, stretched the fabric in the hoops then trimmed and glued the fabric on the back to give it some long-term holding power. But since I can never leave an easy project alone, I upped the ante on a few of the hoops and embroidered a little something fun (more on that in a minute).

In order to figure out the spacing I moved the hoops around on top of the changing table - this was perfect because I wanted to center my composition in that horizontal space and it gave me a good reference for the vertical spacing as well.

After I was satisfied with my arrangement I stretched a level line using thread and 2 thumbtacks. I marked 2 points on the thread, one directly above each edge of the dresser, to represent the bottom corners of the dresser. This made placing my nails super easy. I measured the vertical and horizontal distances from the dresser corners then I could duplicate that spacing by measuring from my reference "corners" on the thread.

That little technique made hanging these a snap! Also, the placement wasn't an exact science so it didn't matter if I was off by a little bit. In the end it only took me about 15 painless minutes to hang all 7 hoops.

Now for the extra embroidery part of the project. To tie in some of the navy accents in the room, I bought solid navy fabric for one of the hoops knowing I would use some fun details to jazz it up. I used little scraps from the other hoops and scraps from the bunting to make this sweet little birds on a wire scene.

Again, this wasn't an exact science. I drew out my bird shapes on paper, cut them out and played with the arrangement before I committed anything to fabric. Then I just traced the outlines onto the fabric, cut them out and tacked them down with a simple whip stitch.