My daughter has been asking for a mobile above her bed for about a year now. Trouble is, she's five years old and most of the mobiles on sale are for babies and not really suitable for a "big girl" room. So, because I'm a try-hard "Martha", we set about making our own. I had wanted to use some of her old baby clothes for something creative - instead of giving them away or shoving them in a box never to be looked at again - and at first I thought I would use them in a quilt for her but then I quickly realized that because I'm not a very good hoarder (i.e not very sentimental when it comes to clothes), I didn't have enough for a decent sized quilt. I did, however, have enough to use in a mobile. And so the Hoop Mobile was born!
I started cutting up her clothes (which was surprisingly hard for me to do) before I had checked that my mobile idea would even work. I was actually very nervous because it could've easily gone a bit pear-shaped and then I'd be left with no clothes, no mobile and bits of baby clothes everywhere! And I really had no idea what I was doing - I just added fabric to various shaped embroidery hoops (which I bought online from Etsy), strung them together randomly (there was no measuring or accuracy involved at all) using white embroidery floss and then tied the completed lengths to two bits of dowel that I'd painted white and tied together. It took a bit of jiggling and jaggling (I'm sure that's a word) to get the mobile balanced once hung but because everything was just knotted on, it was easy to slide the string wherever it needed to be to get it sitting right.
Thankfully, it came to together just how I had imagined it would (this quite often doesn't happen), which delighted both me and my daughter. Phew. I didn't take any photos during "construction" (in the back of my mind I must've thought it wasn't going to work!) but here it is - in all its cuteness ...
I started cutting up her clothes (which was surprisingly hard for me to do) before I had checked that my mobile idea would even work. I was actually very nervous because it could've easily gone a bit pear-shaped and then I'd be left with no clothes, no mobile and bits of baby clothes everywhere! And I really had no idea what I was doing - I just added fabric to various shaped embroidery hoops (which I bought online from Etsy), strung them together randomly (there was no measuring or accuracy involved at all) using white embroidery floss and then tied the completed lengths to two bits of dowel that I'd painted white and tied together. It took a bit of jiggling and jaggling (I'm sure that's a word) to get the mobile balanced once hung but because everything was just knotted on, it was easy to slide the string wherever it needed to be to get it sitting right.
Thankfully, it came to together just how I had imagined it would (this quite often doesn't happen), which delighted both me and my daughter. Phew. I didn't take any photos during "construction" (in the back of my mind I must've thought it wasn't going to work!) but here it is - in all its cuteness ...
Ah, embroidery hoops - I love them. Have you ever used them for something other than embroidering?