After Her Infertility Diagnosis and a Successful IVF Journey, She Painted Lucky Clovers All Over Her Son’s Nursery

Just before India Carlson and her husband bought their Fayetteville, Arkansas, home four years ago, India received an infertility diagnosis with a warning that their chance of having children was quite low. “We had hope, though!” India says. “The [spare] room was always going to be a nursery; we just didn’t know when exactly that would happen.”

Originally, India used the room — which she describes as a former “gray, new-build drywall box” — as both an office and guest room. “After having a successful IVF [in vitro fertilization] frozen embryo transfer with an IVF clinic in Barbados in October 2024, I finally allowed myself to dream of what the spare room could look like,” India says. “My baby wasn’t going to have a boring nursery!”

India wanted the bedroom to feel “whimsical and nostalgic,” and she leaned into children’s storybooks and literature to guide the design (think: Winnie-the-Pooh meets Peter Pan meets Jack and the Beanstalk meets The Lord of the Rings meets The Chronicles of Narnia). “I really strived to make the room feel like it was ripped from the pages of an actual storybook, rather than just storybook-themed, if that makes any sense at all,” she explains.

India was still pregnant with Atlas, now 1 year old, when she and her husband designed most of the room, but she knew how she wanted the room to feel for her son. “I really hope to cultivate a son who is gentle, kind, adventurous, creative, and brave,” she says, “so I tried to envision that little boy, and what his room might look like and what he might feel inspired by.”

She loved the idea of wallpaper but decided to hand-paint a clover mural (after she’d given birth — IYKYK!) in order to keep her budget lower. To start the process, India’s husband painted the walls Benjamin Moore’s “Swiss Coffee” and built custom frames and sills for the windows. 

Keeping the eventual mural in mind, India moved on to creating a gallery wall full of sentimental finds. She thrifted several tattered children’s books, carefully tore out pages she liked, and framed them. Using Canva, India also created quote artwork and framed that. Borrowing her grandfather’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Chicken Little books from the 1940s, she scanned her favorite pages and had those framed, too. On Etsy, she found a map of Peter Pan’s Neverland and a medieval-inspired lion flag.

The existing light fixture was too “builder-grade” to match the whimsical decor, but India couldn’t find anything online that complemented her vision and stayed under budget. So, using “white paper lanterns, polyfill, hot glue, hairspray, and a (rather desperate) prayer,” she created a gorgeous cloud structure for the ceiling for under $30. India filled the room with a thrifted dresser from Facebook Marketplace and a Pottery Barn bookcase, repainted butter yellow, from her teenage bedroom.

Once she was 9 months postpartum, it was finally time to complete the mural. It was a whole lot of work and took her a month, but it was totally worth it. “I felt drawn to clovers specifically because Atlas was our ‘lucky’ embryo that made it to term, and he will always be our lucky charm,” India says. “The oversized clovers also seemed reminiscent of something out of a storybook, like Jack and the Beanstalk, or somewhere a little fairy would reside.” 

Atlas adores spending time in the nursery playing peek-a-boo from behind his crib and pulling books from the bookshelf that is just his height for his parents to read to him. He also loves staring up at the handmade felt dragon mobile his grandmother made.

And he loves, loves, loves his clover mural, says India. “[He] often crawls or walks over to the walls and touches every clover that he can reach from the floor, or from his crib.”