Paper Mobile

I've been consumed by baby things recently. Well baby things and kitchen things. Still finishing up the kitchen renovation! Going on three months now. I work on baby things to get my mind off of kitchen things.

Back when I was setting up my registry I discovered the Amazon registry system. I love the idea because in addition to registering for items on Amazon you can add items from pretty much any other website. This includes Etsy. I loved this.

So of course I browsed Etsy and found all sorts of cute baby items that were adorable but yet not exactly necessary. Things like baby moccasins. Who doesn't need a pair? The other things I really liked was this paper mobile. It's cute and simple. But at $40 it is also a bit pricey. And being simple I thought, "Hey I could do that." Probably not as well, but could certainly give it a whirl.

So I did.

My supplies included:

• Colored cardstock paper
• X-Acto knife
• Illusion Wire (a.k.a. clear string) from the jewelry section
• Clear craft glue

I started out by buying some colored cardstock paper. Fade-RESISTANT cardstock paper! If I remember correctly the paper was $3-4 a sheet. So I was already coming out ahead in my investment.

For just about every piece of the mobile I used the same process. I'd make a stencil. Then trace onto the colored paper.

Stencil

Trace

I kinda quit taking pictures around this point. Things got a little more hairy when I started the clouds. The clouds each consist of 3 identical pieces of paper, each in the shape of the cloud. I would then fold two of the clouds in half, and glue one to each side of the flat cloud. Make sense? The tricky part was getting everything to hold together until the glue could dry.

Since I'm being honest, this mobile ended up taking me longer than I anticipated. I worked on it in pieces. Cutting little pieces of paper out with the X-acto knife gets old after awhile. And then there was the aforementioned frustration of gluing the pieces together. So $40.00? Perhaps it was fair price after all.

However I finally got it done. And it is good enough for me. And good enough for future baby. I'll just never show him the Etsy version.