Mobile

A friend of mine is having a  baby. I wanted to make something for the shower, something decorative but useful, which fit with the safari nursery theme. I was pretty stuck for a bit until I doodled this guy here and then it all came together.

Remarkable I had everything I needed for this project already at my house (thanks to a major craft supply hoarding problem) and I only needed to add one color of felt (the light gray) to complete it. I drew a whole bunch of animals and tried out several versions of each before deciding on an elephant, hippo, zebra, giraffe, rhino, crocodile and lion. The babies room is going to be blue and green so I also made an effort to include those colors in the palate.

Past that it was a simple if time consuming process of hand sewing each animal ( I caught up on a lot of movies) and attaching a length of mint ribbon to each.






































For the base of the mobile I used the inner circle of an embroidery hoop ( I have a bunch of them from an old decorating project)which I wrapped in a beautiful mint silk ribbon. I measured out the placement of the animals and then estimated the length so that there would be some longer and some shorter, for more movement, and then it was time for the fun math/balance portion of the show.

For this I hung the mobile up in the door frame and slowly adjusted each animal until it was hanging straight. Then I attached everything, slowly, with pauses after each animal to check the balance (this was a bit tedious) added a pretty blue trim to the inside of the hoop to cover up all my tinkering and added a little blue bow to top it off.

Then I sat back and just watched it move, which I found very therapeutic. Of course trying to photograph something that is moving is not the easiest but I tried my best to capture all of their different faces. Hopefully this can be something that Baby B and family will enjoy looking at just as much.