sew | nursery bedding set

Even though we decided to find out the gender of our baby at the 20 week ultrasound (girl by the way, for anyone who missed the news!), Isaac and I decided that we want to keep most of our baby gear (nursery set, stroller, car seat, etc.) gender neutral since we hope to have many babies that will end up using the gear. As much as I do like pink in moderation, I wouldn't have wanted an all pink nursery anyways so gender neutral works out pretty well.

As you may recall, I really love Pottery Barn.  Pottery Barn Kids has the best gender neutral nursery bedding (ok, forget gender neutral, they have the best bedding, period) I have seen anywhere.  My absolute favorite is their Harper bedding in green.  Seriously, how great is this stuff?

So fresh, so cute, so.......expensive.  Let's pretend for a second that I might actually consider shelling out the $290.50 for the whole set.  We would still have a couple problems.  Problem #1: the bumpers (my favorite part of the whole set even if you can only use them for a couple months) won't fit our sleigh style crib. Problem #2: ok, stop pretending, I don't actually have $290.50 to spend on a crib set.  So I guess that's the bigger problem.

However, the more I looked at the set the more I realized that it was just straight lines of green ribbon sewn on a plain white crib set.  Hmmm.  How hard could that be?

Turns out not too difficult, but it was a little incredibly time consuming and tedious getting all that ribbon straight and evenly spaced.  This was definitely not an instant gratification project (like most of the projects I do).

Here's my copycat version of the Pottery Barn Harper nursery bedding:

I spent about $60 total on fabric, ribbon, and misc. supplies.  I don't know the exact breakdown of how much each nursery piece ended up costing because I bought my white fabric and ribbon in bulk.  I used Offray ribbon in lemongrass and Kona premium cotton fabric in white. I used a coordinating green and white polka dot fabric from Joann Fabrics for the crib sheet.

Here are links to all the tutorials I used to create this nursery set:

Easy Baby Blanket

Pillow Sham (a picture of the pillow will be coming soon along with a post about the glider chair I recovered)

Crib Sheet

Bumpers

I purchased a set of Nu-Foam crib bumpers from Joann Fabrics (with a 50% off coupon, of course) and directions for making the bumpers are included in the package.  In addition to the package directions, I added the ribbon detailing and white corded piping around the edge for a more finished, professional look.  

Crib Skirt

This one is super easy!  All I did was measure the height from the mattress platform to the floor and the length of the front of the crib.  I added an extra inch to both measurements to allow for hemming all the way around and a couple more inches to the length so I could make a pleat in the center.  I know most people make a full crib skirt with three (or even four) sides attached to a pannel that goes under the mattress, but because we have a lovely sleigh style crib with solid wood sides, I only wanted something to cover the open front of the crib. Also, I didn't want to worry about the crib skirt slipping around every time we needed to change the sheets so I attached the crib skirt directly to the front edge of the mattress platform with adhesive backed velcro. Now whenever we need to change the sheets the crib skirt won't budge an inch.      

P.S. Just in case we needed yet another reminder that God always provides, we received our beautiful crib for free!  Isaac's brother and his wife were offered the crib, but they already had one so they kindly passed it along to us. Thanks guys! I also recently found our brand new, exactly what we were wanting, crib mattress at a garage sale for $5!

I'll eventually put together a post with pictures of the rest of the nursery area once we get everything ready to go. :)