Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Babies + Beads = Bad News

Towards the end of December, my sister and brother-in law will be welcoming their first baby (screaming and excessive hand clapping) and clearly, I couldn't be more excited!  Beings that they have an abundance of self control - opposite of myself - they have chosen to find out their baby's gender at delivery.  According to completely unscientific reports, about 40% of couples take the same approach as my sister....we'll call it the "wait and see."  For the record, I think it's a girl.

Since they don't know the baby's sex, the nursery is gender neutral with grays and yellows, whites and wood tones.  Anne has found a few cute things throughout her pregnancy with elephants on them to decorate the nursery, so when I stumbled up these elephants at World Market, I immediately thought - BABY MOBILE!
I picked up an embroidery hoop (after bringing the hoop home, I stained and sealed it) and some some yarn to hang the elephants from.
To begin, I painted a metal washer with some turquoise acrylic paint and then hung it from our dining room chandelier.  This way, I could suspend the embroidery hoop from it so I could tie each elephant on the mobile.
With my washer dangling from the light fixture, I cut two equal lengths of yarn, fed them through the washer and tied them to the embroidery hoop with a few knots.  Now we were ready to start attaching elephants.
Before we could get started on the elephants, we had to address one small problem - or rather, about 75 small problems.  Beads.  Lots of them.  Which meant the string of elephants needed to be deconstructed and re-assembled WITHOUT said beads. 
I started by snipping the threads that held all of the elephants together to discard the beads.
With the beads out of the way, I used some gold thread and an embroidery needle to tie a knot which would suspend the elephant - side note here: had NO idea what an embroidery needle even was until I found one in my sewing kit and realized it would work perfectly for this project!
 Tie a couple knots here.
 And you should end up with an elephant swinging by a string.
 At this point, I just started tying the elephants onto the embroidery hoop until it was balanced and full.
I would have loved to have taken some photos of the mobile hanging above baby's crib - but my sister lives 4 hours away, so that ain't happenin'.  Luckily, there is a hook above Brent's side of the bed, so he gets to stare at a baby mobile while he goes to sleep each night until we can deliver it to it's rightful owner.
Hopefully baby likes it and doesn't develop a life long fear of elephants!

2 comments:

  1. The needle you used is an upholstery needle, Heidi! Works great for hand stitching around the curves of a cushion, and it's sturdy enough to get through upholstery fabric. My grandma had an upholstery business and I grew up using that kind of needle for all kinds of chores.

    Kathy B

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    1. I've just never even heard of such a thing as an upholstery needle - and that it is round! The closest I get to sewing is getting out my sewing machine and then calling my dad to come over and help me get it set up.

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