as we grow and learn in our marriage, i can't help but be excited about watching him become a father to jacob. he already loves him so much, i can't wait to see him hold him for the first time! over the past couple of
this is the mobile. he made each part of this from scratch, including the animals. he traced the animals onto pine and cut them each out with the jigsaw. he then primed and painted the animals and figured out how he wanted to hang them with twine. you can't see it too well, but we found a thick rope to hang the mobile from the wall brace he made. it's one of the coolest things he has EVER made and this picture doesn't quite do it justice...but it was hard to get different angles of it, since it's hanging high on the wall.
this is the lamp he made. we saw a lamp similar to this in a shop in stowe that was a couple hundred dollars. we thought it was super cool and of course ry thought he could recreate it...so he did. it was a LITTLE harder than one would think, since drilling through river rocks is not the easiest thing in the world to do. he went through a couple masonry bits on the drill, but he finally got through them all. we had bought a junky lamp from walmart to disassemble for the parts of lamp, but all we ended up using was the base and the cord. we picked up the light bulb holder part of the lamp at the hardware store and he was able to thread everything properly and he ended up with what you see. pretty cool, huh?
these next two pictures are not formatted well for the blog, but i needed to make them big enough so that you could see the detail...
this was our first project that we completed. it's not a good picture because i thought i had a better one on the computer, but i didn't. we took old pallets and hooked three of them together for the back. then ry cut out the letters of Jacob's name with the jigsaw, primed them and painted them. red is our accent color, so we thought it'd be fun to do his name in red. we used wood glue to hook them on and that was that. one day it will hang above his changing table once we are in the place where we will actually be living.
and then there's this mosaic! ever since we learned of jacob we wanted to put a map in his nursery. we love learning about different cultures and so we wanted that to be a part of jacob's room somehow. we thought about just buying a map, but then ryan thought it'd be fun to make a world map mosaic. for this he made a frame out of the pallet wood so it would match the jacob sign. he then blew up different pieces of the map and somehow traced it all onto a board he had mounted in the frame (he did that part while i was on a MA trip, which means it took many hours to do so). then we picked out tiles and smashed them up and went to work on putting the land together, followed by the water. then came the final grout and it was done! we estimated that it took about 25-30 hours for this project...but it was totally worth it and we might actually steal it from jacob to put elsewhere in the house...but for now it's in his room!
so there you have it - the nursery pieces we've been working on. they were all ry's ideas and i told him that i'd write on the blog that they were joint efforts...so we'll pretend they were joint efforts ;) isn't my husband unbelievably talented??
