{Every Day}: Nursery Inspiration

With the wee one's arrival only days or weeks away (really only he/she knows when it'll be), we're getting close to finishing up the nursery.

We're still awaiting the bedding, a custom-made order from RockyTop Design on Etsy (and our splurge for the nursery, as we were fortunate enough to get almost all of the other "big" items on loan from my sister - muah sissy!). On the plus side, we know the bedding is en route. On the downside, we also know it's at customs, meaning it could be just days or up to weeks before it actually arrives here in the far East. But, on the plus side again, the bedding really is decorative for now as the wee one will be in a cradle in our room for the first little while, and said cradle is ready! Other than that we still have to get a blind and curtain rod for the window, I'd like to pick up a nice laundry basket, and I plan to make a couple of prints to frame and hang by the crib.

I'll post pictures once it's complete (fingers crossed that the postal-fairies are kind enough to send the bedding soon and that'll be sometime next week). In the meantime, here are a few sources that inspired the style. We started with this hand-embroidered pillow sham that Des had brought back from his trip to Zambia, knowing we wanted to hang it in the nursery. Fortunately, with it's array of colours and cute elephants, it would be an easy fit.

We then wanted to pick colours that weren't "too boyish" or "too girlish", but that we also not the standard cream, yellow and green combo that fills gender-neutral nurseries. After a visit to ohdeedoh.com and ProjectNursery.com, I fell in love with these bright turquoise/orange and soft grey combos, which fit perfectly with the pillow sham ... and could work for either a boy or a girl.

http://projectnursery.com/2010/06/hawkens-nursery-by-anyon-a-k-a-mom/

Loved the striped walls in this one, though it was way to much work for us (and by 'us' I mean D who did all the painting work in the room!) to do.

http://www.ohdeedoh.com/ohdeedoh/noahs-sunshine-nursery-nursery-tour-122750

http://gallery.projectnursery.com/projects/384-Modern-Nesting-Nursery

Once settled on the turquoise/orange/grey colour palette, I went in search of bedding. It was nearly impossible to find anything in that combo on mainstream retail sites, which is how I ended up on etsy.com discovering this fabric collection from RockyTop Design:

from RockyTop Design on Etsy

Can you say love? We were able to pick the different coordinating pieces we wanted using a selection of the above fabrics (you'll see our choices with the final reveal!), which was excellent as most of the pre-packaged sets she offered included a crib skirt. I'm so not a crib-skirt person, a little frou-frou for my tastes, but of course to each their own.

Another source of inspiration was this post even though we didn't go with any owls: