Here’s an easy way to make something spectacular for your walls — paint-chip punch-out art! You need: paint chips, a hole punch, a glue stick, a large piece of heavy weight paper and lots of patience!

I made a picture of a mommy and baby giraffe for my daughter’s nursery.

Start by punching out a whole bunch of paint chips in the shades you want. My suggestion is to pick two complementary colors (in my case coral + grey) and punch from the spectrum of lighter/darker colors around each one — this way you get some great gradation in your artwork. To keep it simple, use one color for the main graphic, and then the other color for your background.

Once you have enough punched out, start moving the pieces around to form the graphic you want. If you don’t have a design in mind, find a picture online and trace the outlines onto your paper to give you some guidance. Here are my giraffes taking shape, just using shades of coral:

Once you have the main graphic looking like you want it, glue each little dot down (this is the tedious part. Do it while you’re watching reruns or something).

Now you can move on to the background. I ended up making silhouettes of trees behind the giraffe using shades of grey. Glue away!

And to tie everything together, scatter a couple little dots in the shade of your main graphic into the background. Here’s the final picture:

And here it is in our nursery. I think it turned out really great, and my daughter really loves staring at the dots so I think she likes it too!

Good luck!

I wanted Noelle to have a really sweet mobile to watch from her crib. This was a fairly time consuming project (hand stitching takes forever!) but uber fun - I made an animal mobile for the nursery using patterns I found for a giraffe, elephant and owl. I made a whale (no pattern, just eyeballed it) and some hearts, and tied them to grey painted dowels. It’s so light a little breeze sends all the animals bobbing and fascinates little Noelle.

Pillows in chunky knits are pretty popular these days (Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Nordstrom) and I wanted some of my own without having to splurge for them, or spend hours knitting! And this project was surprisingly easy to pull off — all you need is an old sweater and some creative manipulation..

Materials:

- 1 old sweater with a chunky knit pattern

- pillow forms

- tools: your sewing machine, scissors

How to do this:

- Lay out your sweater next to your pillow to see how best to make the pattern work with the size of the sweater. Here I find that my sweater will allow me to make two pillow covers, and I’m planning to cut up my sweater so that the fun cable pattern will run exactly down the middle of my finished pillow.

- Remove the sleeves from your sweater. Try not to cut the sleeves off with your scissor to prevent unnecessary fraying for your pillow, but rather, see if you can find that one stitch that holds the pieces together.

- Now the slightly scary part, actually cutting your sweater in half. In order for the cable pattern to be centered for my pillow, I ended up making one straight cut sort of one-thirds from the right front of the sweater (the long holes below are where the sleeves were). And then cutting that piece in half to have two pieces. Each of these pieces will make you one long pillow. Don’t worry that you have raw edges and yarn starting to fray as you cut, it’ll all get sewn together in the end.

- Next, cut each piece into half. You can probably get rid of the scraps around each arm hole. You’ll end up with one longer piece that has the center cable knit pattern, and a shorter piece that came from the section under the holes for the sleeve. Notice that each piece has one nice straight finished edge — which used to be the bottom hem of the sweater. These edges are going to be the ‘closure’ for your pillow, we’re going to sew them in such a way that they overlap and don’t require any buttons or zippers to close off your pillow.

- So now your pieces are cut and you can start sewing! Take the longer piece, place it right side facing up, and fold the ‘nice’ edge over until this piece is about the length of your pillow. Then take the shorter piece, place it right side down (i.e. the wrong side facing up) over the longer piece. You should now have the pieces placed such that all the wrong sides are facing out, with the ‘nice’ edges overlapping each other by at least an inch.

- Now sew the edges all the way around the outside of this rectangle. I tried using a zig-zag stitch to make it more secure, but I think a straight stitch would work just as well. Double check the edges where there are cable knits in case there are gaps there due to the way the cables overlap. Make sure you have a nice covered opening for your pillow. And don’t worry if it looks messy or out of shape, once you get the pillow in it’ll look great. Then flip it inside out!

- At this point, you should have a chunky knit pillow cover that will stretch over your pillow form pretty easily. Flip the ends over, pull it into shape and you’re done! New pillows for the fall/winter season!