Growing with my Girls: The New and Improved Winnie the Pooh Bedroom!

I always knew I wanted to decorate a child's room in Classic Winnie the Pooh decor since, well, I cannot remember when. A long time. I had an old Classic Pooh calendar that I saved intentionally for this purpose, and when I was pregnant for the first time with Caroline, I framed many of the pictures from it for the walls of her bedroom (she didn't actually live in her bedroom until she was well over two, but hey, first-time parents, all we knew was that you just HAD to decorate a baby bedroom!). I also bought a Classic Pooh lamp, light switch cover, and a few porcelain Pooh picture frames, as well as some stuffed animals. We got a crib bedding set at a garage sale... and then never got a crib, so that has since been resold. Caroline had a Classic Pooh themed room, and then the years went by, and when Cecilia moved into the room and furniture got shifted, I took down some of the frames and planned to redo it later. Well, it is much later, and Lucy was ready to move in with Cecilia, now that Caroline is in her own bedroom. So I came up with some ideas and set them into motion, starting with getting a used IKEA Kura bed to use like a loft so that Lucy could sleep on the bottom. I decided that I wanted to make a tree to attach to it. More on that below...

If you have read Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, then you know that many of the animals live in trees, and some of them have signs on their homes. If you have never read these books, then shame on you. Stop reading this right now and come back after you have read them! ;-P Pooh lives 'under the name of Sanders,' and the drawing from the book shows it written with the backwards letters as above. I decided to make several signs so that Cecilia and Lucy can switch them out if they want to pretend that the tree is a specific house.

This one is for Piglet's house, of course. Trespassers W was his grandfather (it's short for Trespassers William, or Trespassers Will for short).

This is the sign for Owl's first house, which is named The Chestnuts. As you can see, Owl's spelling needs a little help. We love how he tries to spell 'Happy Birthday' in the book and have great fun trying to pronounce it. After The Chestnuts blows down in a big storm, Eeyore accidentally gives Piglet's house to Owl. Piglet is too gracious to object, and Pooh lets him come live with him. Owl names his new house The Owlery but spells it 'Wolery.' There is a great debate in our house as to how this misspelling would be pronounced. I actually misspelled Wolery and have not yet made a new sign, ha! I don't own a copy of The House at Pooh Corner, which is where I could have checked the spelling. Whoops.

Above the dresser are the six large calendar pictures that I framed when initially setting this room up as a child's bedroom.

And here is the view of the four directly above the dresser. I love that they have little blurbs from the books in addition to the illustrations. Clockwise from the top left we have: Tigger and Roo stuck in the treetop, Pooh and friends trying to get Eeyore out of the stream by throwing a large rock near him, Christopher Robin coming downstairs with Pooh bumping behind him, and Pooh at Owl's house when he is looking for Eeyore's lost tail.

On the sides are one of Eeyore to the left and one of Christopher Robin and Pooh to the right.

The bookshelf next to the windows has the Pooh lamp on it, as well as a picture frame and a music box. I need to update the photo in the frame - that is a picture of one year old Caroline! Now that it is Cecilia and lucy's room, I need photos of them in this frame and the one on the dresser of Pooh reaching to get a honey pot off a shelf.

The music box, sadly, had an accident of an unknown nature. It happened one day long ago when we had lots of kids over. Nobody could tell me exactly what had happened, but poor Piglet and Tigger lost their ears. :( But it is still adorable, so it is still on the bookshelf! The tiny set of Winnie the Pooh books are from BP. Yes, the gas station. I have no idea how we got them, actually, but they have the BP logo on the backs. Lucy really likes them right now. They contain excerpts from the actual book.

This is above Cecilia's bed. Hers is the top of the loft, but as you can see from the photos, it is not very high. I didn't want Lucy to climb up and do acrobatics up there and then have a six foot fall. Cecilia's crucifix is above her head. I have to figure out where to put one for Lucy - attach it to the bed itself, I guess. There are also these two smaller framed pictures from the old Pooh calendar - it had a section in the back with tear-out postcards. They were the perfect size for smaller frames... there are also two above the lamp in the above photos.

Three more postcard-pictures in frames beside the closet door.

And here are the stuffed animals... I had the Eeyore since I was in high school. He came to college with me. The kangaroo is from some random place and is not actually meant to be a Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal, but it works for Kanga. The other three were bought when I was pregnant with Caroline - same brand as Eeyore (Gund), but they had changed them to a fuzzy style. Piglet was one of Caroline's favorite stuffed animals when she was two. She called him "Me" because of the part in the story when he wrote the note that said, "Help! Piglet (me)!!" She also insisted that Piglet was a she and also gave "her" elaborate extra names: 'Piglet Me Plip Ditz' was the longest and funniest one!

The chair they are sitting on belonged to my mom - it was in her kindergarten classroom!! They redid the furniture in the school and gave the chairs to the parents or something along those lines... so cool! We repainted the chair pink - it used to be painted a dark brown. I think my mom made the cushions on it. It was in my room when I was a child.

The bed came still partially assembled from the previous owner... you can switch the slats so that they are either all white or all blue. That was a hassle, so we just left them. For Lucy's birthday, she is getting a vintage Classic Pooh flat bedsheet and pillowcase from eBay. I love eBay! I'll just use a plain white fitted sheet with it. We have some other flat sheets that were my brothers' when they were little. Apparently old fitted sheets don't hold up too long. Although those green sheets on there in this photo were mine in college, so... But the fitted sheet from my Snoopy set is long gone. Yes, I had Snoopy sheets in college. My kids still use the flat sheet and pillowcase. Old sheets are the best - they are so soft! We even have one that from the 80s that has Snoopy playing what looks like an Atari-style game, ha.

The tree was a blast to make. Well, it was for me. You can ask Chris if he had fun cutting it out with his jigsaw in the thunder. Making big trees out of paper was almost a pastime of mine... I made several for my mom's preschool, and Chris and I made one together when we first started dating, awww. (I tried to put a heart here, but Blogger apparently sees the little pointy thingie as being code and it messed up my post and gave me a long section of html saying "Blogger data escaped you." Oops!!) The trees I have made in the past typically had each individual branch cut out, and leaves could be attached, but I figured that Chris and the jigsaw would not appreciate all those curves and points, plus I was going for stability. There is a separate panel of branches/leaves that is attached to the end of the bed - I initially wanted to make a trunk on that part too, but I ran out of wood. So it is just the leaves on the end, to keep anyone from falling off the end of the bed, or so they will break the leaf section off if they do fall, ha. You can see just a little bit of blue above that leaf panel on the end - that is a tent that came with the bed. Cecilia doesn't like how dark it is when the tent is pulled down the entire length of the bed, so it is bunched up at the end for now. When the tent is fully extended, I bet it will look kinda like a treehouse sticking out of the treetop!

I don't recommend spray-painting an entire six foot tall tree. Maybe they used to make spray paint cans easier, but I thought I had given myself carpel tunnel or something for a few days afterwards! It was cheaper to get spray paint than a can. The leaves and bark are just acrylic paint that I sponged on after cutting some old sponges into the shapes I wanted. I was hesitant about the bark; it is not quite the look I envisioned, but it is better than a bare, flat-color trunk all the way down.

The tree is screwed into the wood of the bed in a few places, and we plan to get an L shaped bracket to attach the two panels together on the backside of the leaves, just for added stability. I freehanded the tree and then adjusted it a bunch until I liked it before Chris cut it out. Maybe I should sell templates, ha.

You might have noticed the pictures above the bed... these were Cecilia and Caroline's addition, completely their own idea. Cecilia drew each character from the book, then Caroline wrote names on them and colored them with watercolor pencils, and they painted over parts of them. They really wanted to help decorate the room, and they spent a long time on these. I love when they come up with ideas like this... I only wish they'd mentioned it to me so I could have given them watercolor paper. Chris suggested that we laminate them so they would hang flat. I put them up above the bed with a strip of ribbon to connect them, making a sort of border along the top of the wall above the bed.

Cecilia put the drawings in the order in which she wanted them to be hung along the wall. Below Tigger, Rabbit, and Owl, you see her Guardian Angel craft she made at some point. Caroline made one for Lucy, too, so it is hanging on the underside of the bed on one of the inside panels. That awesome framed picture is an amazing, huge cross stitch picture from my college roommate, Aura Lee. It is a gorgeous fairy tale scene with the alphabet and numbers in the border. Caroline pointed out that it is actually hers... it does have 2005 cross stitched into it, after all... but for now it will stay in Cecilia and Lucy's room.

Here are close-ups of their artwork, taken before I hung them up:

Piglet and Pooh are my favorites of their drawings here!

Above their Pooh and Piglet lightswitch is their little "shrine" area, ha. Except it might be sacrilegious to put Anne of Green Gables's house and a cross stitched baby bootie picture in a shrine, so... Really, I just put little breakables up here out of reach. The St. Clare and St. Cecilia statues came from my brother Tim, who bought them in Italy for Cecilia, his goddaughter. They are her patron saints since her name is Cecilia Clare. The little one of Saints Francis and Clare is one he got in Assisi, and we decided to make it be Lucy's. I think my mom might have made the baby bootie cross stitch; I will have to ask. It has my name and birthdate on it. The three crosses belong to each of the three girls: the Noah's ark one was given to Caroline as a baby, the small one with the girl praying was for Cecilia from Uncle Tim on her baptism, and the baptism cross was given to Lucy by her Gran and Grandad. Caroline has another pink cross that I think is hanging somewhere in her own bedroom now... At some point, I have thought I might put pegs on the underside part of the shelf for them to hang up rosaries (or, let's be realistic, push pins or nails are much more likely!).

Some varied views of the room....

My grandfather made that wooden circus wagon when I was little - it is a great place for keeping stuffed animals. It used to be in my bedroom and has survived over the years, maybe because my mom got on to us whenever she found us trying to sit in it and pull it around!

The frog organizer on the closet door was something like $5 from IKEA many years ago... their socks, tights, and bloomers/cartwheel shorts are stored in there. The fairy picture on the wall was made with a tracing kit by Caroline as a birthday gift for Cecilia one year. The "Child of God" wall hanging was given to Lucy by my parents (and her godparents) for her baptism. The Holly Hobby-type hooks were in my room when I was a kid - Cecilia keeps her dance bag hung there as well as a couple little purses and bags.

Cecilia and Caroline also drew this Pooh scene, so I hung it on the back of the door.

These two are my favorites of all the framed Pooh pictures... Christopher Robin nailing Eeyore's tail back on, and Pooh meeting Tigger in the candlelight... so sweet.

So, the room is a mixture of my favorite way of doing things: reusing/repurposing old items, secondhand furniture and such, and handmade pieces and touches.

Hope you enjoyed the tour of our Classic Winnie-the-Pooh bedroom!

Update: The sheet came in the mail - here it is!

And this evening, Cecilia showed me the setup she had created in the tree... All I can think is that Tigger has some amazing skillz to be staying in that position by himself!