Adventurous Accessories

• Baby pirates float gently in a sea of Briney tales with a few props. A colorful stuffed parrot perched on a clothes stand calls up the Caribbean without the squawking calls. An old wooden barrel hides a diaper pail or holds crib linens or toys. A plush croc peeks over the edge of the changing table with a real clock clenched in his grinning teeth. And Tinkerbell and her friends sail around in a mobile of gossamer and sparkles, keeping an eye on the Lost Boys and all travelers who make it to the nursery past the second star on the right.
  
  

Surrounded by the Sea

• Remove the walls in the bedroom with illusions. Paint murals to cover at least one wall from floor to ceiling. Don't forget the undersea world with its mysterious creatures and sunken treasure. Lots of blue is a soothing color, so paint sea and sky to surround pirate ships, peg-leg buccaneers and derring-do on the high seas. If your talents lean more toward paste than paint, dedicate a wall to a pirate mural, a coral reef scene with clownfish, octopuses, waving anemone and a few scattered doubloons gleaming on the white sand. Add the doubloons with gold hobby paint.
  
  

Brigands in the Brig

• Shiver me timbers, a pirate's ransom will buy a theatrical fantasy of gangplanks, half-hulls as indoor treehouses, a crow's nest with a rope ladder for the look-out and dreamy, watery painted images of sharks, sea turtles and flying fish to sail over the walls and ceiling. An added brig the size of a London telephone booth has open walls with vertical wooden poles and a hinged door made of dowels painted to look like prison bars. Borrow ideas from pirate tales, movies and Peter Pan to design a playroom with lots of options for climbing, swinging and pretending. In a bedroom, transform bunk beds into a pirate ship with portholes -- real or painted -- for headboards, rope running up the sides of the ladder and canvas curtains on rods to pull across the beds for plotting nefarious deeds away from prying eyes.
  
  

Piratical Portholes

• Hang tattered sails in the windows of your pirate's room, like sails flapping from the mast of a rogue galleon. For curtain rods, use wooden spars and make the curtains from unbleached canvas, tea-stained from fake salt spray and wear, cut ragged at the bottom. If the room has shades, use thick fishing net as draped valances over them and fasten old cork buoys and a stuffed fish or two in the nets. Paint a skull and crossbones on each shade. Create a "real" porthole by attaching plywood with a circle cut out of the middle to the wall surrounding a window. Paint the wood to look like a hull and old brass porthole frame, and hang curtains of ropey net on either side of the opening.