I tried to finish the board and batten today so that I could tell you all about it–I really did. But I couldn’t find the caulk. Dave and I both keep hoping the other person will finish the board and batten every time we leave the house. Anyway, given this tragic lack of caulk, I made a crib skirt instead.

We have the Sundvik crib from Ikea:

As you can see, it has solid panels on the ends that come pretty close to the ground, leaving only one non-wall facing side that needs any kind of adornment. And, really, I didn’t mind it without one; I kind of like a Spartan crib. But I had the extra fabric from the curtains, so I figured I might as well go ahead and make one.

So I did. Mostly, it was remarkably similar to making no-sew curtains: measure, cut, measure, iron (heat and bond)….until you have a rectangle the right size. For more detailed instructions see one of the 8 million tutorials online or my post about making the matching curtains a little while back.

After all the ironing and not sewing, it looked like that.

Now I had to figure out a way to attach it to the crib. I had made a trip to Hobby Lobby to search for the proper equipment awhile back. I came home with some velcro adhesive tape from Sewology. They had about a million different sizes of this, and they had either self-sticking or sew-on varieties. Unfortunately, all of the adhesive kinds said they weren’t good for things like….fabric.

Luckily, I happen to own a $3 tool that will solve all your adhesion related troubles:

 

I was reasonably confident that between the sticky tape on the back of the velcro and a precautionary couple of dots of glue, I’d be covered. It’s not like the crib skirt has to move around a lot or anything.

So I attached  strips of the softer part of the velcro to my unsewed rectangle, spacing them every 10 inches (randomly, having guessed wildly at the perfect spacing) along the edge.

Then I took it upstairs and fed it through the crib and arranged it just above the ground.

After all that careful measuring getting one side of the velcro on, I realized that it didn’t really make much difference; the easiest thing was just to match the other side up to the pieces on the fabric and then stick it down on the crib.

See those holes? There’s a line of those every so often all along the  crib, so I used them as a guide to line up the fabric, along with frequent checks to see if it looked fairly even along the ground.

And all finished:

You guys are so sneaky; you got yourselves ANOTHER board and batten preview.

I still have enough fabric left to make a pillow cover or something! I really shouldn’t be proud of that, since it just means I bought too much fabric.

Oh, I should say that, to be honest, I was not super impressed with the velcro-like tape. I’m a little nervous about the consequences should I want to take the crib skirt down. It only needs to last a few months until we lower the mattress, though, so I may just go with lint rolling and spot cleaning where necessary rather than risk it all falling apart either in the wash or on its way there. Still–I spent something like $2.50 on the velcro tape (it was on sale) and used fabric I already had, so I think the trade-off in durability vs. a real crib skirt was worth it. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble with it staying put as long as I don’t try to mess with it overmuch. I will report back if I discover otherwise!