The Nana Nursery Diaries – Country Design Home

The Art of the Nursery

As we continued to work on the nursery, my daughter and I looked at several black and white animal prints to use as artwork. She wanted something simple and graphic vs. “cutesy”, yet suitable for a nursery. A quick search online revealed these geometric, yet whimsical designs on Etsy. The company, Paint X Print designs all sorts of graphic prints for downloads-meaning they send you the file to print yourself-in whatever size and medium you choose. The mom-to-be chose three geometric designs in the shape of a pudgy bear,

a maple leaf

and a wolf– to complement our Black & White Woodland Theme.

Since the designs were sent to me in digital form, it was easy enough to copy them onto my Cricut Design Space to cut out. As you can see, the originals on the Etsy website were printed in black on a white background. We could have printed and framed them as is, but these natural wood slices (that were used a few years back for wedding shower décor blackboards and I hung on to for whatever reason…)

Life is Sweet Chalkboard were the perfect “woodsy” theme frame- and a perfect graphic backdrop when re-painted black.
I think I have mentioned in the past that my Cricut machine is so much fun!

Cricut Gold For the average DIY-er it is incredibly versatile-cutting anything from paper to poster board to vinyl-even thin layers of wood! whatever your imagination can dream up, it can cut. In this case, I used a white glossy vinyl, cutting each design to fit the wood slices, then transferring them to the wood. Look how intricate these cuts are-that would have taken me hours by hand! (No, actually, I never would have attempted this by hand…) The wood piece for the bear was an odd shape and didn’t seem complete until we had added an extra star from the moon and the stars decals (on hand from the wall mural).

Bear Graphic on Wood.JPG Once completed, I sealed them all with a satin poly coating.

Animal Graphics on Wood.jpg
They are now hanging on the wall over the rocking chair in the nursery. Another project down, a few more to go (hopefully) before baby Arbra makes his entrance into the world. I’ll be back with more DIY nursery projects shortly! xoxoxo Susan

Gonna Build a Mountain…

For the past few weeks, we have been converting a small study/office at my expectant daughter’s home into a nursery for our newest (soon to be born) grandson. When she first mentioned that her chosen color scheme was simply black and white, I have to admit I was a wee bit skeptical. However, as the nursery has taken shape, it has proven to be the perfect choice for a baby boy’s room! All of the walls were painted in Benjamin Moore “Wedding Veil White” eggshell finish.

Wedding Veil White Benjamin Moore

This color is a smoky white that is a neutral backdrop for all of the black and gray accents. First up-the mountains. We created the expansive mountain mural on the largest wall, essentially the length of the entire room, using different shades of Behr and Benjamin Moore paints. This isn’t really difficult, just time-consuming. AND, your taping and measuring needs to be pretty exact to create the crisp, clean lines of the mountain range-the key is to work in layers. Here is the before (well, not exactly-we had pretty much cleaned it out-we just had to remove the dog : )

Baby nursery dog The first step was to decide on the scope and scale of the mountains, then tape them off. There is no right or wrong here-the only thing I did measure was the angle of the mountain tops to keep them in some sort of symmetry.

Once I finished taping them, I marked the lines with pencil, then peeled the tape back so that I could paint the sky above the peaks to match the rest of the walls. Everything required two coats, so there was a lot of watching paint dry-literally.

Mountain Mural Pulling Tape Back Once the sky was dry, we started with the light colored mountains, then layered the darker ones on top as we built the range. There was quite a bit of taping and re-taping as we went along. Just remember that the paint needs to dry and cure before you re-tape over it-otherwise it will peel right off with the tape!

Mountain Mural Progress.JPG Once the range was in place, we added a couple of snow-caps for contrast using zig-zag Frog painting tape.

Mountain Snow Caps.JPG There are loads of DIY mountain range tutorials on Pinterest that have simple instructions to follow-once we got started, we just sort of winged it until the range was completed to our liking. And then finally, we added the sky. My intention was to cut out stencils of the moon and the stars to paint onto the sky, but my daughter had other (simpler) ideas. A quick search on Amazon revealed the perfect inexpensive cutouts- a quick click of the button and they were on her doorstep the next day! As we added them one by one, it literally just came to life and completed the look of the mountain range under a dreamy night sky. Mountains and Stars.jpg

Full Mountain Range Once that was completed, we re-assembled the gray Pottery Barn Kids crib that was once my grandson’s-now a 3-year-old who sleeps in his “big boy” bed!

Mural and Crib This lucky little baby will be “sleeping under the stars” every night in his new nursery. We can’t wait to meet him! In the meantime, more DIY Black and White Nursery ideas to follow. Have a (hopefully where you are) sunny Sunday everyone! xoxo Susan