How a colorful wedding cake inspired this colorful nursery design

If you’ve seen our wedding on Offbeat Bride you might remember the colourful polka dot cake that I made. I seriously feel happy every time I look at that matrix of colour!

When I started following @ohhappyday on Instagram, I discovered they had a dot wall which reminded me of our wedding cake…

I even noticed that they had a tutorial on how they did it. I knew I needed a dot wall in our home. And what better spot than our baby’s nursery?

I decided that getting up on a stool to paint circles wouldn’t work (now that I was pregnant), and it wasn’t something that I didn’t trust anyone else to do for me. Instead I found vinyl dots from Surface Inspired, a Vancouver based Etsy Shop. They only had listings for single colour decals so I contacted them for a custom order of multiple colours. I sent of the number of each colour that I needed, and they were quick to turnaround a package for me.

So while I was home visiting family one weekend, my husband, Rob, painted a white accent wall for me so that I could start measuring out and applying the dot decals. The rest of the walls were to remain its “happy blue” because the colour makes me happy.

I normally would have started out measuring from top to bottom. But, being pregnant, I decided to go from the ground up. After placing the first dot, I measured 2″ to the left and 2″ up to mark where the next row and column would go. I started out applying the dots in a random pattern but tried to use each colour only once in the row/column. As I neared the top, this was nearly impossible so then I started standing back to see which colour was “needed” in that particular position to balance out the colour arrangement. Because I started from far right of the room and decided to use exactly 2″ intervals, it left me with a partial dot at the far left of the room. I broke out the card stock cutter that I had bought to make our wedding invitations and it worked like a charm!

It took about two-and-a-half hours to measure out, and apply, the first two rows of dots. A lot of this was due to arranging and rearranging the dots before applying them to the wall. To speed the process up, later I started arranging the dot sheets on the floor to see the order that I would apply the dots to the wall. I would do this first, take a break or run some errands and then start measuring out and applying the dots again. It made the process feel a whole lot quicker.

The whole process took about one month to complete. I was so happy with the result. Just looking at the wall would fill me with happiness and I hoped that it would do the same for our baby girl that was on the way.

Because the room was small, I wanted to keep everything bright so I went with the Mercer 3-in-1 Convertible Crib — I loved that it had storage on the bottom! Going with white was also a great contrast to the awesome quilt that I had bought from Pippa Quilts on Etsy.

I also ordered the Baby Letto Hudson Changer Dresser, because I loved the combination of drawers and shelves.

Above the change table, I wanted something to distract the baby and found these colourful tetrahedrons that arrived in flat sheets but you punched out, folded and glued together.

Being a huge Nick Park fan, above the crib I wanted to make a mobile with Shaun the Sheep (from the Wallace and Gromit). So I purchased five Shaun the Sheep keychains from Amazon. I picked up two wooden embroidery hoops and clear jewellery string to make the two mobiles.

Although I was advised to not go with a white glider (because it will definitely end up with puke on it), I went with a white glider. So far, so good — the white glider is currently puke free!

It’s the Fogo model from Dutailier’s Moderno series. Because I have a lot of neck and back issues and my sister had the same model and knew that it would have the support that I needed. It also had a locking mechanism which also comes in handy.

I found a cool coloured flag tote on ModCloth, and thought it would be perfect to hold all of the toys that the baby had been gifted already. The only downfall is that when our seven-year-old Lakeland Terrier, Jax, gets jealous he digs out toys from it to run off with for attention. It’s an ongoing battle, but we’re slowly making progress.

I had stumbled upon two cloud-shaped book shelves and thought they would be perfect on the two walls where the closet juts out (especially seeing how the wall was already a perfect sky blue)! Being narrow, we could only fit a few books on them.

And because of the angled wall in her room, there was nowhere to place a bookshelf so my Father-In-Law helped me make a narrower version of the bookshelves in this tutorial that I found on Pinterest.

Lastly, the angled wall blocked a fair amount of light so we needed a light to go in that corner. The issue we had was finding a light that didn’t come up past the cloud shelves that we had recently installed. While walking through Rona one day picking up some lightbulbs, we happened to stumble across this colourful lamp with adjustable goosenecks and it worked perfectly for Lilliana’s colourful room.

I’ve always said that colour makes me happy. Hopefully it makes my daughter feel the same way too!