kojotutorial: appliqued crib skirt

Once you've made a custom, recovered crib bumper, your nursery requires ;) a similarly fabulous crib skirt to match.  You can definitely make one from scratch (like I said, we've used the Amy Butler In Stitches nursery patterns with great success)... Or, if you have expensive taste in fabric like we do, you can buy a crib skirt from Target and applique it to match your nursery decor.

To do so, you'll need:
-a plain crib skirt (ours was Circo, plain white) to fit your crib
-cardstock for making stencils
-scraps of fabric for appliques
-several yards of thick grosgrain ribbon that coordinates with your decor (optional)
-fusible webbing
-an iron
-a sewing machine

1. Iron (and iron and iron) your crib skirt until all the wrinkles are out and you have a lovely, flat work surface.  Pin thick grosgrain ribbon about an inch from the bottom seam of your crib skirt to ground your design.  Stitch the bottom edge of the ribbon in place.  If you don't need to tuck any part of your design into the grosgrain, you could stitch the top edge down as well.  I was making trees whose trunks needed to be tucked into the thick grosgrain, so I stitched the top edge later. ***Just a note- if your taste errs on the preppy side and you just want a simple crib skirt, you could stop here!  The grosgrain bordered crib skirt was super cute on its own.

2. Make stencils to coordinate with your nursery decor.  I made a 'tree' (actually, just a raindrop shape), 'branches' and a bird.

3. Cut out a whole stack of your designs using fabric that matches your nursery decor (I used remnants from the crib bumper and solid colors to match).  Also, cut out a whole stack of matching fusible webbing shapes to match up with your fabric shapes.

4. It's best to fully decorate/embellish your appliques before you iron them onto your crib skirt, so if you have any accents to add, now is the time to do it (I added all of the 'branches' to my 'trees' and left the birds alone).

5. Pin your appliques in place on your crib skirt before you start ironing them in place to help with even spacing... I actually needed to measure everything out as well (my crib skirt was 96" long, fyi... so with my 'trees' and 'birds' measured and some simple division, I could space things out evenly).  When everything looks right, iron your appliques to your crib skirt and stitch around the perimeter of each applique.

6. With everything ironed on and stitched around, you're done!  Put your lovely, custom crib skirt on your crib and admire!