Mobile Project

At the request of one of my loyal followers, ;) here is the account of my adventures in making a mobile for my cute daughter!

More than a year ago I saw a clip while watching Studio5 in Utah about making a mobile from paper, ribbon, and an embroidery hoop. I filed that idea away. At the time, I actually thought that a butterfly mobile was really cheesy. Haha.

So now having a daughter who I want to fall asleep in her crib, I decided she needed something to look at while in bed. Hence the need for a mobile.

I found the tutorial online here.

My mom gave me a Cricut cutting machine last Christmas? I think. And so I decided to use the cartridges that I have and go with a butterfly and flower theme.
You may recall that her bedding has both flowers and a few butterflies on it from this post.
So I used my Cricut to cut all of the paper pieces that hang from the mobile. There are 136 punch outs--68 pairs (one on each side of a Zot glue dot). I cut my pieces at 2" and 1.5".

Then I stretched a wire that I found in the jewelry section of JoAnn's across the diameter of the hoop and twisted it around the hoop with pliers to secure it. I crossed a second wire and repeated that step.

Then I cut 20 feet of ribbon to tie around a 12 inch embroidery hoop. I only used the inside piece because I didn't want the tightening knob sticking out. We also decided to count out how many pieces of ribbon I had so I knew how many to tie in each quarter of the hoop. It would have had a few empty inches at the end if we hadn't counted it out. (Peter thought of this after I finished tying the first quarter.)

After tying on all the ribbons, I matched all of the paper pieces up and stuck them together on 20" pieces of fishing line using Medium sized Zots. Most of the time I stretched the Zots to make them cover more space.

Then I arranged all of the pieces of fishing line according to height. (I varied how far apart I glued each shape on every line.) The longest one went in the center of the two wires. Then the next longest went in the middle of the wires, and the rest went along the embroidery hoop.

I glued 3 thick pieces of ribbon around the hoop to tie and hang the mobile from (the length of the roll only allowed me 3 pieces at the size I wanted them to be.)

Then I hung it up in Claire's room.

It took me probably 3 weeks to do all of it just because I only worked on it at night after Claire went to bed and before I went to bed. Cutting the paper definitely took the longest, even with the Cricut. I don't know if it would go faster with a regular punch though. You could punch multiple papers at one time, but I didn't do that. I was going to tie an organza bow at the top to cover the lame knot, but I can't tie a pretty bow apparently. 

Overall, I think it turned out really cute. Obviously we put the picture up before I decided to put up a mobile, so that doesn't look so great. But Claire definitely looked at it for at least the first day. I don't know anymore though because she looks at me when I come into or even near the room.

One other note, I had a hard time finding papers to match her bedding, so I decided to just ignore it and do something that was cute and coordinated.

So maybe you too are interested in making a mobile? It's definitely an easy project to do while watching TV :D