Weekend Goodies & Crafting

Baby bedding is ugly. This was one of our first realizations as we walked through Babies R Us a few weeks after finding out that I was pregnant. Ugly. Everything is super themed, feels cheap, and if it's actually remotely decent it is expensive (especially considering you are not supposed to use the bumper or the quilt actually in the bed due to SIDS). We went back & forth on what we liked and finally decided I should give making the bedding a shot. I'm a self-taught sewer so I figure I've got a few months worth of trial & error to figure it out.

So after arming myself with fabric & a weekend, I decided to try and give quilting another shot (I've only done one before this & it was 18 months ago). I ended up roughly drawing up a pattern & going big (go big or go home) for a toddler bed or for cuddling on the couch:

After finishing most of the blocking on the bigger quilt, I set it aside for a while and after R's urging, started on a smaller "crib sized" quilt to lay over the rail or use for tummy time. It's about 75% complete (still need to put the batting in, finish the back, and actually quilt it). Not bad for about a day or so worth of work (and $30 in materials after coupons & sales) between the two of them. I have additional fabric to do her sheets (black modal jersey) & bed skirt with extra to spare. The extra fabric on top is from trying to tuck it into my closet doors for a picture (fail).

Other random tidbits for the weekend:

- We found out our importer friend cannot get us our stroller until December at the earliest. We're still weighing whether it's worth waiting until December to get our first choice for $300-350 (retailer cost with the import charges) or if we should try another route, find another stroller, etc.

- Insurance change was approved this morning & will go into effect July 1st. This means we should be able to deliver at our 1st choice hospital with an OB-GYN who believes in low-internvention child birth instead of at a hospital that wouldn't even let us see the L&D rooms unless I was actually in labor.

- Part of my push this year has been to go more energy-friendly/green. R did packaging for one of the major CFL bulb companies, so we literally have boxes upon boxes of standard CFL bulbs that we used to replace all of our standard lighting in the house. We’ve been replacing the rest of our more specialized lights as we’ve seen them on sale… but we’ve found the absolute best place for this is Costco. On Sunday we popped in for a quick trip and were stoked to find dome bulbs, in a six pack, for $2.39 after an instant coupon from GE. We’ve been waiting to find a suitable replacement for those ugly, warm, expensive bulb lights in our bathrooms (the ugly white mega-strips with eight bulbs) and these worked like a charm. This leaves just the dimmable lights left in the house to replace! We’ve seen a good drop in the power bill since we started switching over.