Shedding some light on the subject

So I’m not *quite* done posting yet, in part because we have a new and nerdy addition to the baby’s room courtesy of my clever husband.

What’s that you say? It’s a birdhouse!  And a nightlight!  A birdhouse nightlight! It glows!

There it is lit from the outside rather than the inside. By day, it’s going to be a lovely decorative addition, sitting on its own tiny shelf, looking as if it’s perched in one of the decal trees on the wall. By night, a light!  It’s LED-lit, battery operated, with a clever switch in back, and Jeff put the entire thing together himself. Well, we bought the birdhouse but let me go ahead and not get ahead of myself.

To make such an item, one must have supplies:  a birdhouse, battery connector, battery case (4 AA), resistors, rocker switch, two max intensity bright white 3.5V LEDs, four ceramic or rare earth magnets, electrical tape, batteries, heat-shrinkable solder sleeves and bits of cheesecloth. We got all of it at Radio Shack except for the birdhouse, which we got at Beverly’s crafts.

The tools required: soldering iron and solder, hair dryer, Dremel with drill/sanding attachments, drill with spade bits, hot glue gun, eyeglasses-size flathead screwdriver, small hammer. Oh – and also apparently the Warranty Voider Leatherman from Make is helpful.

Once you gather everything, you make a lot of mess.  But then you do some really cool electrical magic, and POOF. You have a light!  Well, it’s magic to me. Jeff informs me instead that you use some wires to connect bits in this order:  The positive side of the battery pack is wired to 2 resistors, and those are each connected to an LED, and those are connected to the switch, which then connects to the negative side of the battery pack. If you see what I mean. There are little shrinky-dink type things which cover the soldering and wires, and possibly some electrical tape in there. And then, like I say, magic:

Then once it gets into the birdhouse, it all looks kind of like this:

But I’m ahead of myself again. After putting together all the electrical parts, you carefully pry off the roof with a very small screwdriver. Our roof was glued on within an inch of its life. After it finally came apart, Jeff sanded the edges and hot-glued a pair of magnets to the inside under the roof, one pair on each side, so that the roof “grips” the house rather than just sitting loosely on top.

Then you install the switch. I had picked out a lovely rocker switch, and Jeff used a wood spade bit to make a hole in the back to install the switch. The front and back of the switch actually come apart and screw together to keep it attached to the wood (less messy than glue!).

Then it was time to make holes for the light to shine through. It was obvious early on that the one hole in the front wouldn’t let out sufficient light. So first I drew a star on one side and a crescent moon on the other in pencil, and Jeff used the Dremel with a narrow drill bit to mark the outline. One must be careful to not drill into all the interior wiring! Or you could wait to install the electrical until the holes are all made, but Jeff just could NOT wait to get the wiring installed

We wanted still MORE light after testing these holes, so Jeff drilled a pattern of holes into the roof “tiles”, followed by drilling a pair of “skylights” in the roof with the wood spade bit.

As a final touch, Jeff hot-glued little bits of white cheesecloth behind the door and the skylights. The loose, white weave lets almost all the light through and makes it seem to glow, while the cloth covering conveniently hides the electrical innards. Since the birdhouse is unfinished, the cheesecloth goes well with this sort of rustic, unfinished look. And then it was done!  And then I took about 50 pictures of it.

Where did this idea come from?  Well, years ago I saw a birdhouse nightlight on a tree that had leaves made from vintage wallpaper. The artist for the lamp and leaves was Inke Heiland. That favorite image had a lot to do with why my baby’s room ended up with leaves and trees. We also considered the Owl night light, but it’s out of stock and a bit overdone. The Inke Heiland lamp is still sold – but it costs over $300 with shipping. No way!  I don’t need a lamp made of “salvaged French oak” and Jeff didn’t like that it had a cord running down the wall. So – Jeff decided he could make his own.

And here it is!  We are quite pleased.

Well, folks, we are creeping quickly toward the final event over here. My last day of actually going in to work is tomorrow, for which I am incredibly grateful. I am nothing if not completely awkward at this point, and I spend a lot of time trying to remember things I forgot, and wishing for naps. This may be a natural process, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy!

Maybe I’m done

Last week I decided to make a baby cardigan. I got my yarn, I downloaded the pattern, and I made this:

I think it’s actually 3-6 month size, not newborn – but I guess I will see.  This sweater is the Bombay Love by Rima Aranha, with long sleeves, one of the choices I offered back in February when I asked you guys about what cardigan to make.  I will probably also make the baby kimono wrap from that set of sweaters, but due to a severe lack of energy, it may take a little while. Probably a few months, in fact.

For now, this gray-and-green mandarin-style cardigan will have to do, and the good thing is that I like it a lot, so that works out. I even like the i-cord for the fastening, which I crocheted directly onto the sweater instead of sewing it.  It didn’t take very long to make, even at pregnant-woman-slow-speed. It was a very enjoyable pattern, seamless and quite simple and I think it turned out well.

This is more yarn from my stash. The gray is Caron Simply soft, and the green is the last tiny bit left from the Red Heart Soft yarn I used for the baby blanket and the bunting. The changes I made to the pattern were super simple – I crocheted the body and shoulders (the pattern creates a raglan-style sleeve) and then after fastening off the body I did a few extra arm rows on each side. Then I  added 2 rows of trim instead of one.

Oh, so what’s this sweater then?  I did not make this.

Unbelievably, I found this very pretty handmade crocheted sweater at a local thrift store. It, of course, had to come home with me. It looks like it’s about 6-9 month size. I think it was about $3. I wonder how the person who made it would feel about her handmade baby garment being sold at a thrift store … I might not feel that great about that. This is why I rarely make things for people, even myself.

One more picture – my cousin gave me a surprise baby shower this past weekend, which was very sweet of her to do. My husband and brother managed to keep it from me, even (very surprising for them, they are not secret people!). She is excellent at decor and details, as you can see, down to the stickers on the little champagne glasses (well, the pink lemonade glass, anyway). It was fun. We played games my five-year-old cousin picked out, and I ate too much cake!

Since I’m full term, I could disappear anytime now. I am probably going to have to give up crafting for a bit, because sewing and cooking and even crochet take more energy than I really have anymore. On Saturday, the process of getting up made me so tired that I took a morning nap. Yes, it’s that bad! All I have to do now is finish up my projects at work (luckily, my brain still works) and get some rest!

Wishes: Comfort

After a few months of steady (if not very constant) effort, Jeff and I have finished putting together the baby’s room. I’ve shown you pieces of it over time that I’ve made, but this is the entire enchilada.  And a woodsy and colorful enchilada it is, too. It’s supposed to be a sort of forest, if you were having a forest party, I guess.  It’s actually a tiny room (8×9?) so we didn’t want to clutter it up, and since we can’t paint our walls we had to figure out other way to make it cheerful.

I think the first thing we got for the baby was bedding back in August, right after we first found out, because we just really wanted to get something because we were so excited. It was one of those early moments of joy and trepidation and weakness. The bedding is called Treetop Friends from Skip*Hop. Being me, I liked the embroidery and applique, and the tree, and the colors, and the owl. So we got it, and we put it in a closet, and nothing else happened for a while.

Fast forward a few months and I finished putting all my crafting paraphernalia into the closet, and we had finally cleared the room of its random collection of junk. I finished the bunting and hung it up. The room continued to be used as a guest room. If you’ve been to my house, you know just how much different this looks now than it did (the sofa bed is the only thing the same). It was a very empty room. Then in January we decided we had to do something before I got too big to do anything.

Most of this is designed to have an impact without spending a lot of money, and to fit in storage without taking up much space. Also to be cute without making me want to throw up. We have a lot of vinyl decals in the room – birch trees, flowers, birds – to sub for paint. We got a couple of inexpensive pieces of art (one from Etsy, one from a local shop), cut matting and used plain IKEA frames. The crib is from Babyletto (it has storage!) and the Koppang dresser from Ikea. There’s a soft brown shag rug on the floor, and the gingham curtains I made in the window.

There is no art above the crib because – can anyone guess? We live in earthquake country! It would be terrible to have something fall into the crib!

The room is weird because although it is tiny, it has two gigantic closets. One is my sewing/crafting area, and the other is a deep closet with shelves. We hung a closet rod on one level, and the rest has baskets for the baby’s stuff – books, bottles, miscellany, toys, clothes that are too big now, etc. The crib stores bedding. Everything else is in the dresser. Her cosleeper is in our room, and the stroller normally lives in here too.

I also have a rocking chair, but I decided to leave the sofa bed in here. Having this in here means we can’t really have guests overnight very easily, and maybe only one person … but on the other hand, Jeff and I can nap here with the baby! I am going to get a throw blanket too. It’s a very comfortable and quiet place to sit or nap, and also a good flat place to catch overflow from the crafting area should I need it. I’m growing cuttings from my ivy and my spider plant to eventually hang in the window.

There are a lot of tiny details that went into making this room what it is. We found an inexpensive owl-print changing pad cover, and the dresser has hand-painted owl knobs! I’m not going to lie to you, I got a dresser with knobs so I could get nice knobs. It’s a thing I like.

In general I tried to make the leaves on the pillow I made echo the leaves in the bedding and the flower decals on the wall. There is a lot of brown and green in here, colors I love. I tried hard not to go overboard with owls, but … owls are cool. I substituted a few blue birds for some owls. There is such a thing as the bluebird of happiness, after all, so it only seemed appropriate.

Hope you enjoyed my tour I’m quite pleased with this room. I only wish I were as pleased with the rest of the house! It’s a nice room to just hang out in at this point, very calming to me. It looks exactly like a room I might have wanted when I was little – and in fact does echo some of the things that I had and loved when I was little – gingham, a white dresser with painted knobs, primary colors, and I’ve always loved trees and flowers.

Jeff, however, thinks it maybe doesn’t have enough raccoons yet, though.