Get creative with your kids! From cotton book bags to items like this love bird mobile, Fun Family Crafts contains a wealth of project ideas that are perfect for encouraging children’s creativity. One of the first crafts in this book is learning how to make this darling mobile using items like a wire coat hanger, ribbon, cloth scraps, buttons, and string!
Kitchen Lovebirds Mobile
You will need:
6 One wire coathanger
6 Wire cutters
6 Masking tape
6 2 1/4 yards ribbon (this is more than enough)
6 Sewing needle and thread
6 Scraps of plain fabric: linen works quite well
6 Scraps of patterned fabric: vintage, florals and brights look lovely against the plain
6 Embroidery floss—a few different shades work well
6 Four small buttons (non-matching is fine)
6 A very small amount of polyester fiberfill or fabric scraps to plump out your birds
6 Chopsticks
Instructions
- Take your wire coathanger and cut off the hook and twisted part of its base with the wire cutters. (If you’re making this with a child, it’s probably best to do this part yourself.)
- Bend the wire into a rough heart shape, with an inch or so overlap on one of the sides of the heart.
- Use a small amount of masking tape to bind the wire ends together.
- Use another small piece of masking tape to hold down one end of your length of ribbon, then start winding the ribbon around the wire until you reach the end. I’ve suggested having a little extra ribbon just in case—you don’t want to run out just before you reach the end.
- Use your needle and thread to pop a few stitches in the ribbon when you’ve finished covering the entire wire heart shape, snipping off any excess ribbon.
- Now take your small scraps of plain fabric and cut out a bird shape, as shown on page 230. Use the first cut-out piece of fabric as a pattern to make another three shapes the same size, taking care to make two pieces mirror-images of the first two.
- Cut another two pairs of the smaller bird shapes from your small scraps of patterned fabric (four different pieces will look lovely, as long as they roughly match or look good together) to sit inside the hemp bird shape. They don’t need to be perfect—an approximation of the shape will do.
- Attach the patterned fabric to the outside of the plain fabric with a running stitch in a lovely bright embroidery floss, and sew on the button where the eye would be.
- Repeat Step 8 until all four sides of the two birds are completed.
- With the patterned fabric facing outwards, sew two mirror-image bird shapes together around the edges using an overcasting stitch—don’t fret if it looks a little frayed and messy; that’s its charm—and leave about 1 inch open.
By: Kelly Doust (Thunder Bay Press ISBN 9781607103028)