Room Makeover

What is a normal "mourning" for taking over the room of your 20-something daughter? While at college? After college graduation? Or when they have been out of the country for two years?

That should be enough time.  She is always welcomed back, but we have several guests coming over the spring break, and needed her room.  We wanted it to still be "Zoe's" room, but cleaned up (from removing stuffed animals and prom corsages) and grown up.

Here are some before pictures:

Zoe was supposed to clean up some of her stuff when she was here for a couple of weeks last summer. But she didn't. So to facilitate the process we used three different color post-its and FaceTime. I showed her an area and I flagged it Trash, Donate, Keep.  It actually went pretty quickly. I also marked on the post-it if she wanted me to take a picture of it, and then get rid of it. She could use the pictures for a scrapbook, blog posts, or whatever. Here is her Zoe collection.

So after everything was sorted in huge bins in the hall, we had her room painted.

Now here is the final reveal! This was from her dorm room - the bottom half is for notes and mail, and there are small hooks for keys.

This bed (Ikea) is awesome, not only does it have big drawers, the bed rolls out to form a huge queen bed. There are two mattresses stacked and when you roll it out, you slide over the other mattress. We also got the side table on wheels so it can move out of the way when expanding the bed. Inside the door of the side table is a outlet so you can charge up your phone.

I was inspired by a pillow at Anthropologie.  So easy to make, cut out circles, fold them into quarters, line them up, and sew them along the top. 

But I also can swap out the pillows from some of Zoe's. The doll pillow has the border from her old "blankie."

It was fun and sticky to make the string globe lights, but I think they turned out nice. I followed the directions from here - Made Everyday.

These are her prints she made as a college photography student.

This is what is left of her clothes, plenty of room for guests.

Whew! That's done! Now onto the bathroom, always something to do!

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Reversible Headboard Slipcover

We made a padded headboard awhile ago with an old sheet, using a tutorial much like this one. We would just swap out different quilts and coverlets, by pinning it using safety pins.  But as part of our bedroom makeover, I wanted a more permanent solution. So I rummaged in my fabric stash for some cool fabric. I found a cool (I know it's trendy) grey chevron and a piece of my daughter's dorm room curtain.  I thought I could create a reversible headboard slipcover using both pieces. It was really easy. I thought I could just slip this cover over, but I had to add in a zipper to make the slipcover fit nice and tight.

Before

After

After - reversed

1. Gather your supplies: two large pieces of fabric, and one piece of contrasting fabric (I used yellow), scissors, pins, measuring tape, sewing machine, 16" or longer zipper, and thread.

2. Measure the length and width of your headboard, and add one inch to the width and length. For example, if your headboard is 80 length x 36 width, you would have 81 x 37.  Using these dimensions, cut from each piece of large fabric. If you want, you can finish the bottom of each piece, but I didn't because it doesn't show.

Get off of there!

3. Measure the depth of your headboard, and add one inch.  For example, my headboard was approximately 3 inches deep, so I need strips that were four inches wide. So cut strips from your contrasting fabric 4 inches wide, sew the strips together so you have one long strip that is at least as long as two widths and one length of your headboard.

Contrasting yellow

4. To sew the strip to one of side of your headboard fabric, pin rights sides together, starting at the bottom of one edge of the width, along one side of the length, and then back down to the other width. I don't like to use pins, so I didn't, I just lined up the fabric and sewed, contrasting fabric on the top. When you get to the corner, make sure your sewing machine needle is down at the corner, turn the fabric to 90 degrees, where you would start along the length, clip the contrasting fabric from the raw edge towards the needle. Bunch up all the contrasting fabric on the left, but make sure the raw edge is almost lined up with the headboard fabric, then sew, trying not to pleat the contrasting fabric. Keep sewing all the way around.

5. Now attach the other large piece, and place where the zipper will go (the bottom of one side of the headboard fabric). Now sew the contrasting fabric to the other side of the headboard, but don't go all the way down to the last part. Just to the zipper.  Now sew in your zipper. (I am not great at it, so just look up a tutorial that will work for you). As you can see from my pictures, I had to unpick and resew in the zipper.

Zipper when chevron side is forward.

Zipper when teal side is forward.

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