I've finally finished the last touch for Baby R's nursery! We had always planned to use the leftover fabric to make some cute canvases to decorate the wall above his cot. However, a missing sewing machine presser foot and dodgy stapler conspired against me, forcing me to post-pone several times.
Rachel and I chose the background colours and pictures for each canvas before Baby R even arrived, and cut them out ready. But then, having no functional sewing machine, we had to pause.
The weekend after Baby R's arrival, Mum came down and brought her sewing machine (so she could quarter some of our excessively voluminous muslins) so I comandeered it for a while to sew the pictures to the backgrounds. Mum suggested wadding the pictures, which gives a nice 3D effect. Makes it look cuter.
Soon they were all sewn together, ready to be stapled to the blank canvases we'd bought months previously:
Our stapler is vicious. Seriously. You need Herculean strength to force the thing to shoot out one staple, and then, as a general rule, it doesn't actually go far enough into whatever material you are stapling into. We had this issue when we were re-covering our kitchen chairs, and thought it was the density of the wood. However, since we encountered the self-same problem while stapling into soft pine wood, blame has to be assigned to the darsardly stapler.
Mum did her best to power the staples out, and we were making some headway. Until, that is, we ran out of staples. We returned to the garage to try to locate some staples. We ended up with some that nearly but not quite fitted, so that the stapler fired out two at a time and generally messed about. Thus, we abandoned the project again.
The canvases sat on the side in the kitchen until today, when I finally managed to finish them off, using Mum's stapler, which she'd lent us. What a relief to get it finished!
I suppose, technically, the project isn't entirely finished until they are up on the nursery wall, but I'm happy to have least got this far.
So cute!
P.S. I'm having anxiety about the word "canvases". I feel it should have two s's, as in "canvasses" so it keeps the short "a" sound. Otherwise, surely you'd have to pronounce it "canvaises"? Is canvases the American spelling? What a pickle!