I’ve entered a few pictures of Julianna’s playroom in Ohdeedoh.com’s nursery colors contest. Check it out and vote for us! The 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes are a crib, toddler bed and children’s table with 2 chairs, respectively, from Argington furniture.

Here’s my first photo:

I am, of course, proud of the room but I think I also have an advantage in the fact that I may have a little more experience with photography than the other entrants. It’s amazing how much better a room looks when you put the camera on a tripod and only allow natural light (no overhead lighting, no flash on camera).

I think this room is a testament to how much color can compensate for a limited budget. The only items that were bought especially for the nursery are the IKEA Malm dressers and the Wal-Mart rocker - everything else came from other rooms in the house. The most expensive item in this room is the rocker, which was only around $150! I discovered I needed a good, comfortable rocker when Julianna was born and I began nursing with c-section pain. The second priciest item is the Eames (actually, it’s a 1960s knockoff from a company called Krueger) chair, which I picked up on eBay. The chrome legs were rusted and peeling, so I recovered them with black duct tape. You can’t tell unless you get up close. The 1950s turquoise ottoman was my grandmother’s and it’s been in my family for a loooong time. Andrew gave me the blue lamps as a birthday present a few years ago - they’re from the Crate & Barrel outlet in Kittery, ME. The curtains and floor lamp are from IKEA.

The artwork above the “Eames” chair is by Charley Harper (very trendy right now). Sitting on the chair is Andrew’s old teddy bear, “Mici Macko” (Winnie the Pooh in Hungarian) and my old Paddington Bear. The white children’s rocker was a gift from my grandparents to me when I was born.

The striped bins are a Pottery Barn purchase from a few years back. The orange leather-covered box was a Christmas gift from my mom - I think it’s from TJ Maxx. The artwork is all mine - I created the silhouettes from vintage postcard photos, except for the dog image - that’s actually our dog, Bingo. We had some old frames laying around and I decided to paint them with Benjamin Moore Color Samples. I created the artwork, painted the frames and designed this arrangement rather quickly and explicitly for this contest. When I find the time, I’ll tweak the colors in the artwork a little more to my liking.

Thanks for looking!

Check out these beautifully handmade wood & wire frame dolls with felt clothing on Flickr. I think these are a great alternative to made-with-lead-paint-in-China Mattel toys, although I’m not sure they could stand up to daily handling from a child. Photos/crafts from Soozs.

Yesterday, Andrew and my dad finished tearing down the old wallpaper in the nursery. What’s underneath isn’t so pretty - a layer of old sizing for the wallpaper and some other gobbledy-gook. It looks like we’re going to have to learn how to skim coat in order to even out these walls before priming and painting (we’ll use Benjamin Moore’s EcoSpec, since I’m leery of using anything more toxic than that while pregnant).

I played around with the swatch colors in Photoshop and animated the choices in Flash - the color should be pretty accurate:

Color choices at night with incandescent lighting and camera flash:

Color choices before noon, natural light, no camera flash:

Now that I’m safely into my 2nd trimester, I’ve decided to get started on the nursery. Right now I’m looking at a nursery set from Wal-Mart (!), which is actually not bad. The style is called “Roxanne” from their Modern Nursery Collection. I’m really not sure how I want to decorate the room yet, so I’ve just started fooling around with Google Sketchup to come up with some ideas. Here’s my first stab at it: