A New Take On An Old Favourite

Ever since Spool created their free bird mobile pattern, everyone with a needle and a baby has been sewing birdie upon birdie from fabric scraps. 

The original Spool mobile:

I started making a mobile for Tilly last winter using their pattern, and yesterday, it finally hung above her bed. Now, I made a few changes to the design, for a few reasons. Firstly, because I got sick and tired of sewing birds. Yes, it's a simple pattern, but hand-stitching fiddly, fraying, curved-pieces of cotton is not my cup of tea. Give me felt any day. So, sewing four birds is all I could bear. And secondly, because I do not trust my branch-balancing skills enough to put sharp pointy wooden "spears" above Tilly's bed. Forget SIDS, I'd be worried about SIKS (Sudden Infant Kebab Syndrome).

So, my birdies perch comfortably on embroidery hoops, each swinging at his own pace. I don't think anyone has ever had an organ pierced by an embroidery hoop.

Tilly is fascinated by her new birdie friends... perhaps too much so. When she woke me up this morning, it was because she was tired. I have a feeling she'd been up for an hour or so already, just happily staring at her birds!

Tilly's Mobile

The mobile is complete! And, I managed to stay within the limits of my challenge to myself: don't buy any new materials to make it, and don't unpack any more boxes to find supplies.

Here is what I ended up using:

• 6 pipe cleaners
• 1 long piece of recycled ribbon from a Christmas present from my Mum
• fishing wire
• 7 felted balls
• 1 small square of white felt
• stuffing
• some of that string/ribbon you can buy that has pink pompoms attached

The hardest thing, really, was making the hoop. I started off with just basic wire, trying to wind it around bowls and jugs to make a circle, but it was much too flimsy and kept slipping off whatever I was winding it around. So, pipe-cleaners to the rescue! Much sturdier, and I was able to create a circle from three of them without wrapping them around anything. Then I used three more to wrap tightly around the first three, making the whole thing a lot stronger.

The pipe-cleaners looked okay on their own, but a bit too homemade... more like something Tilly herself will be making in a few years! So I tried wrapping them with wool, first, but it was taking forever! So, I thought, what is wider than wool? And luckily the ribbon basket was right there on the shelf! Almost all of the ribbon I have comes from being wrapped around presents from my Mum... this beauty was nice and long, and so I simply wrapped, and then glued the end down.

The fishing wire was pretty simple... it fitted through the eye of a larger needle, and then I sewed the felt goodies in place, taking care to have it all balance. And the heart was just a free-hand cut shape... I'm sure if you're looking for a pattern, there are plenty of good heart templates online. The pompoms were just cut off the string they came on, and sewn to the heart. Easy!

Isn't there just something about felt that makes a place feel like home?