Matchy Matchy

In November I had to go buy snowpants for the kiddo and I went to one of those Once Upon a Child locations for them.  While there, I came across an eight dollar wooden doll cradle.  Score!  I lugged it home, set it on the ground, and someone promptly confiscated it.

And so I repossessed it and stuck it in my craft room, where it sat untouched until last week.  

With the baby coming, I thought this would help her transition to having a little sister.  You know, with her own baby doll and whatnot.  So I saved up this project for a birthday gift, but with all this cold weather, I just could not muster enough energy to drag it outside.  I had no desire to spend time sanding this thing in the polar vortex.

But last week we had a solar vortex!  Hah!  I think it hit 40 degrees for two days straight, so I took advantage of that heatwave.  Sorry, I have no pictures of the sanded cradle.  It was not that interesting.  This past weekend I used paint leftover from her room and gave this thing a facelift.  The thing is, I had some serious doubts about painting it and stenciling it to match her room.

In case you've forgotten, here is her room:

And here is the finished cradle:

Is it too much?  I can't decide.  I considered painting over the stencils and doing a cherry blossom motif, but I couldn't find that stencil.  So I'm leaving it for now.

I made the cradle a little mattress, a pillow, and a blanket.  

For the mattress and the pillow, I took apart a stained pillow.  Do you want to see that?  I think you do, because I took a picture of it.

Gross, right?  So here's the thing about this pillow.  It seems that this is leftover from an old boyfriend.  I don't know why I have it still, probably because I don't think I can donate pillows to the goodwill and I don't like to throw things away that just get in landfills, so I've been hanging onto it. Blah.  As for the boyfriend, well he was greasy (obviously).  He thought it was funny that he oozed.  He had inherited it from his dad.  He said that his mom had to put towels on the recliner behind his dad's head to save the furniture from oil stains.  I thought he was joking, but she had actually done that.  Anyway, I always tell my husband that he saved me from a lifetime of greasy pillows.   But why do I have this biohazard?  I thought I left all grossness with the ex, but I think that he secretly planted this in my moving boxes.  That would not be unheard of. When I packed up my things after we broke up, I found out later that he had taken all of the expired things from the medicine chest and shoved them in one of my boxes.  Weird, right?

Anyway, it actually wasn't that gross after I took off the cover, but I was already committed to its destruction.  I wanted the stuffing for the cradle mattress.  I don't have any process photos, but it was pretty easy, because it was not a down pillow or anything.  I just tore off a piece of the stuffing and made a mattress cover.  Did the same thing with the pillow, but added decorative lace to the edges.

And then I made a little quilt from some leftover mattress fabric, some leftover batting from some quilting project, some swiss dots (dotted swiss, whatever) for the back, and leftover fabric from the ironing board.  I added lace to the seams and zigzag stitched around the edges.  It was the quickest project in the history of projects.