When our first son was born, we happily accepted an unused hand-me-down crib from his co-sleeping cousin. Hubby was a grad student -- we'd accept all the safety-approved hand-me-downs we could find! He slept in this beautiful cherry finished Jenny Lind crib for his first 10 months or so. (Like the stereo under the crib to play white noise for the sleeping baby?!)
But it was a drop-side crib. While great for me (I'm petite, and lifting a swaddled babe over a non-dropped side of this crib was quite the feat for me!), eventually the CPSC recalled this model and banned the sale of all drop-side cribs in the U.S. Though our son had not (yet) begun to throw tantrums in the crib, we did fear for his shaking a side loose and risking injury. So we handed the lovely piece back to my cousin for her to create something sentimental with for their own home, and we ordered a replacement crib.
The new crib had a few perks: it was lower to the ground to start with, and it had a storage drawer for extra blankets underneath the crib! It also could convert to a toddler bed and can convert to a full-sized bed down the road if we ever choose to do that when we're done having babies!
For Baby 2, on the way, we are re-using this crib, and Hubby built Son 1 a big boy twin bed for Christmas so that we could "pass the crib" over to baby brother.
With the crib reassembled in our nursery, we had one little problem. Do you see in that picture of the (new) crib above where you can see the sides of the drawer along the bottom? Yeah, not so pretty. AND when our son began sleeping in the crib, we already had the mattress in the lowest position since he was already pulling up to standing in the crib. Nothing in the drawer showed between the slats because the mattress was all the way down, just above the drawer.
But with a newborn to lay in the crib, the mattress will be higher up, and you can see all the goodies we shove in that drawer for bed changes and swaddle wrappings. Not so pretty.
To go with our theme and color scheme for the nursery, I ordered a beautiful blue and gray Amy Butler polka-dot fabric from Fabric.com and used this tutorial from Young House Love to base my crib skirt on, with some modifications.
First, I ironed all the hems on all 4 sides of the long piece along the front. Then I ironed 3 of the hems (top, bottom, and one side) of the 2 side pieces. That way, I could iron the 4th side of each side piece to the hemmed edge of the front piece, making one continuous skirt piece so as not to reveal the drawer's contents between the splits at each corner - especially since our crib is a rectangle, but the mattress frame has rounded corners and wouldn't be a sharp 90degree corner where the two edges could meet.
Here you can see how they meet on the front side of each corner.
Then I snipped some pieces of super-sticky-backed Velcro to adhere my crib skirt to the mattress frame. I started at the front, center point and worked outward to ensure my crib skirt was centered and any slack to wrap around the back corners would be even on both sides.
I initially planned on fixing it to the top of the frame, leaving it hanging down from there, but due to the way our mattress frame attaches to the wooden crib, this wouldn't work at the front corners I was trying to disguise, so I had to velcro the fabric to the front edges of the mattress frame. The frame is still hidden since I left a miniscule lip of fabric sticking up above the frame and even more so once you place the mattress (and later crib sheet) over top of it too.
Voila! Drawer contents hidden! And whenever we have to lower the mattress, I can just add in a new strip of iron-on hem tape (I used Stitch Witchery from Michael's) along the entire hem of the crib skirt.
But we still had this problem of the drawer sides peeking out the bottom of both sides of the crib.
I had initially wanted to make the crib skirt 3 separate pieces, like Sherry at Young House Love did, so that I could make the 2 sides long enough to drape to the floor and disguise the drawer, but due to the drawer-slide mechanisms, I couldn't drape fabric continuously all the way down.
I started with 4 yards of this fabric (the window treatment and a new Boppy pillow cover will also be made from this fabric), and had plenty of scraps from my cuts. So I pulled out 2 pieces and cut them to be nearly 26.5" wide by 5 inches high (after using iron-on-hem tape to finish the edges) to fit that space on each side of the drawer.
It worked out that this was the finished selvage edge of the fabric, so I only had to hem 3 sides and used the un-hemmed side (since it wouldn't unravel) at the top to Velcro along the bottom of the side crib railing.
Since the mattress will never drop down that low, those 2 pieces can stay put as long as we keep the nursery the same colors and even after the mattress is in the lowest position, negating the need for the rest of the crib skirt altogether! So it really worked out to be better to be separate anyway!
Now, to finish painting the 2nd coat of paint in there so I can focus on the window treatments, DIY mobile, and getting Hubby to spray paint the garage-sale changing table we picked up (since spray paint isn't No-VOC, meaning I can't paint it myself while baking the little bun in the oven)...
Nesting truly is a powerful force...I am so driven to work on this room every day so that it will be ready for Baby B before his imminent arrival!
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