Bookshelves...

I'm fairly certain, that every parent comes across this problem that I've had recently. What you do with all the books they get! I've been looking in the expensive kid magazines to find a nice bookshelf unit for all those books we have. I hate spending that kind of money on book shelves... I have just been dreading it. Until I found a pinterest solution! I saw a pin for a great way to display books with the gutter bookshelves. LOVED it. Then I got to thinking about it, and with my luck, someone is going to get hurt with that metal stuff. The tutorial showed how to cap everything off to make it safe, the blogger even said it was safer than the other options because she said her kid liked to climb stuff, and that if he tried to climb these, they would basically fall apart. I'm thinking that not only are they going to fall apart, but the likelyhood of someone getting hurt is pretty high. I was a bit sad once I came to this conclusion. However, the post didn't end there! It had all these other great ideas for how to display kids books in their room. I love having them all face outward so the child can see the artwork. What kid wants to pick a book by looking at the spine? I can see about 30 books being taken out before the right one is found. So I found this tutorial by Penny Carnival that I absolutely loved.

I have this OCD thing about me, and I need to re-do the top one. My measurements were off, and the fabric overlaps the books on the bottom one. Going to drive me nuts. Also? Notice how I wasn't paying attention when I was sewing, and the letters are all facing to the right? Yeah, my OCD brain can't handle it. I went back to the fabric store for more, and guess what? In true Christina fashion, that print is GONE. I'm going to check back again this week, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. If anything I'll just get a nice complimentary color or pattern, but I'm bummed because I REALLY like that pattern! Oh well.

I should say that the top one is measured to what the blog tutorial says. Then I tried to put all the little baby books in it, and realized that the little baby books were being swallowed by the depth of the fabric. You couldn't see the front of the books, which was the whole point in this in the first place. I went back and cut it shorter and brought a book with me to check what it would look like in it before I did any more sewing. So the bottom one is basically the tutorial measurement cut in half. Sort of. Also, My dowels were not as long as the tutorial said to be. So the first one I measured out according to the tutorial, then realized after I was done with it that the fabric was WAY too long for my dowels I got. Fail! So after a few mistakes I finally got it to where I wanted it to be. I'm really pleased with how cute it came out. I'm going to do 2 more levels, then get some vinyl cut out with a cute saying to put by the books. I want to get a nice (not crappy, but not LuvSac pricey) bean bag to put in the corner. I've seen some really cute 'reading nooks' on pinterest. I'm not going to get too crazy though.

I'm so pleased with my project! It was a lot of fun, helped me get more famiarized with my sewing machine, and I got to free up some space by getting an actual spot for books!