News flash: baby bedding can be crazy expensive. Most of it is also a death trap. Sure, our parents used crib bumpers with us and here I am alive today, but think about putting one on your baby’s crib now and you’ll be nominated for the “worst parent of the year” award. Are people worrying too much about every little thing? Probably. But this is advice I’ll gladly follow, even though some of the baby bedding sets that still sell those suffocation hazards are absolutely adorable. Why? Because it’s one more thing we don’t have to buy. We’ve set out to buy only baby essentials, adding in a few things here or there if we consider them worth it, really cute, or something that will make our kid smarter than yours. Anyway, our nursery just doesn’t have much space, so we don’t need all the random stuff people try to sell us these days.

So what do you REALLY need for a baby’s crib? A mattress, waterproof mattress cover, fitted crib sheet, and a crib skirt. Heck, you don’t even need the crib skirt, but it looks cute and it hides the storage box we have under the bed so I decided to use one. See our nursery-in-progress in that picture above? That’s the crib skirt I made and it was the easiest project ever. Not only did it save us a few bucks, but it perfectly matches our color scheme and is adjustable so it’ll fit the bed when our baby grows out of the highest mattress setting on day two. I roughly followed the tutorial found here, but there are a few things I should mention since I did make a couple of necessary changes.

First thing’s first: if you want to make this project as simple as possible, find a fabric that is the length of your crib (our crib is 53.5″ long). Of course the fabric I found to match our nursery is only 45″ long, so I chose a coordinating plain grey fabric and added a pleat in the middle. (See here for instructions on adding a pleat.) The second thing I changed: how I attached the crib skirt. In the tutorial, she suggests taking push pins/tacs and sticking them straight in the wood of the crib. I actually tried this at first, but there are a few issues with this method. 1. I don’t like the idea of tacs being around my baby. Is our child going to reach under the mattress and yank out a tac? Probably not, but it doesn’t seem appropriate. 2. Our crib must be made of stainless steel/diamonds/ some other ridiculously strong type of material disguised as wood. The push pins broke when I tried to stick them in, and I even tried hammering in a nail and it wouldn’t work. Instead, I went back to the fabric store and bought some Velcro. I attached the Velcro to each of the pieces and secured them to the crib this way. Now the skirt can be removed for washing and it’ll be a breeze to adjust when we do drop that mattress down.

If you have cats that like to mess up/attack your fabric and ruin everything in their path, this could take you a couple of days. Otherwise, it can easily be completed in a day and requires very basic sewing skills. If you don’t have a sewing machine, you could even use Stitch Witchery to hem the sides. So there you have it- a simple DIY crib skirt for your little one’s bed!

P.s. I am fully aware of the fact that the giraffe stuffed animal in my picture should not be in the crib. The horror! Blankets, crib bumpers, stuffed animals, and pillows… All no-go’s. Then again, it’s sweet and I like it so for now, while baby is still cookin’ in my big ol’ belly, in the crib it will stay.