I know that it has been a while since we have made any posts (pregnancy or otherwise) so here is a recent photo that we took a few weeks ago just to assure you that I am getting bigger every week.
Everything has been going according to plan, but lots of other things have been taking up more of our time. I have been working full time up until this week, as has Brian, and as I have been getting bigger, I have found myself going to bed earlier and earlier. Carrying around our wee one is making me more and more tired. We have spent whatever wakeful hours I have celebrating 2 baby showers, getting the baby's room ready, taking birthing, newborn, CPR and breastfeeding classes and watching the Duck's enter the NHL playoffs. Go Ducks!
Now that I am home...napping mostly...I have a bit more time to tell you about what we have been up to. My favorite project so far has been our custom home-made baby mobile.
We have a whimsical theme of "Fantasy Travel" that we came up with for the baby's room. It is a combination of our love of travel and our love of movies. One such favorite movie is Disney's Up, which happens to make me think of my late Grandpa Duane. Mr. Fredricksen may have been a cranky old man, but he had a love of adventure and a great love for his wife, just like my grandfather.
So I started with a concept sketch of the house from the movie. I had originally planned on making it entirely of felt, but Brian quickly mocked up one in cardboard.
We decided that this little house of cardboard and tape would be far more detailed than I could make out of just felt, so we decided to use it as our centerpiece.
I cut out the different colored walls and roofs of the house out of felt and went about gluing them to the little cardboard home.
Soon we had a little colorful house!
In the movie, the house gets a lift into the air with hundreds and hundreds of colorful balloons all tied together with strings.
We found a link on Pinterest that showed us how to make our own pom-poms out of yarn and a fork and got to work!
As much fun as it was to make our own pom-pom "balloons" from yarn, making hundreds of them seemed to be irksome and tiring. No one would be able to see the ones in the middle of the great mass of "balloons" anyway, so we came up with an idea to use paper maiche to create the illusion of more balloons.
The paper maiche mass in the middle would be lightweight and give us a surface to glue the "balloons" to. We gave the mass an imperfect tear drop shape to look more free form with the "balloons".
Next, to give it the illusion of being up in the air, we created some cute puffy white clouds to dance around the colorful balloons and little house. These were just made like little pillows with felt sides and a poly-blend stuffing in the middle. These were all hand-stitched.
In order to hang all of these cute elements together, I found some string and two embroidery hoops of differing sizes which I wrapped in white yarn to help them blend into the "sky".
Here you can see it all come together after we have hung it in the baby's room.
Best of all, it reminds me of my Grandpa Duane, who I know will always be there watching over our little gentleman. We miss you Grandpa.
This makes me smile everyday that I see it. We think it came out beautifully.
