The Breuers: Craft Project : Crib Skirt

After shopping around for crib skirts and not finding anything I loved, I decided to make my own. I found a fabric that I really liked online, and then I read some tutorials about how to make a crib skirt. It seemed easy enough, so I gave it a shot. This is the tutorial that I mainly followed.

Basically I cut three sheets of fabric - one for the front and one for each side. The back of the crib is against the wall, so it doesn't need a skirt. Then I hemmed the sides of each panel using hem tape, which was way easier than learning how to sew, in my opinion. Finally, I attached the panels to the mattress frame using velcro.

There were a few issues:

I couldn't attach the velcro to the top of the mattress frame like in the tutorial because there are arms coming down at each end that prevent the fabric from wrapping on top. So I had to velcro to the sides of the frame. This resulted in a bit of the frame remaining exposed. I would have preferred it to be all covered by fabric, which the mattress resting directly on top of the skirt.
The sticky velcro squares I bought did not adhere to the fabric very well. I solved this by using my hot glue gun to attach them.
Then I discovered that the velcro squares also do not attach very well to the metal mattress frame. I haven't figured out a solution to this yet. I wanted to just super glue them, but Joseph doesn't want them to be permanent (not sure why). He suggested cutting a slit in the velcro squares and using zip ties to attach them to the mattress frame. We'll probably give that a shot this weekend and see how it goes. If it doesn't work, I'm just using super glue.
I decided to orient the fabric so that the chevron stripes were vertical (there are 8 different colored stripes). Originally I was going to do them horizontal, but I realized you wouldn't see very many lines. Making the fabric vertical would allow a lot of lines (and thus a lot of alternating colors) to be displayed. Also, that's the way the fabric was cut so it was easier to stick with that orientation. However, I failed to take into account the slats of the crib, and each slat appears to hide the same colors. So now instead of seeing all 8 colors, you only see a few.

An alternative to velcro that I saw on another tutorial would be to attach thin pieces of fabric to the panels and tie them to the metal springs of the mattress. I didn't do this because of the frame arms that I mentioned, but in retrospect it seems like it would have been better. I could have cut slits in the panels to wrap around the frame arms.

So - not a perfect project, but it looks good enough for me! I do have a lot of extra fabric, so if I'm feeling motivated, I may attempt to make a better one.