Choosing a mobile for the nursery is the hardest decorating decision for me. I knew that I wanted a fun fabric this time around, and I planned to base the room off of the colors in the fabric. Walking through Walmart, I found this fun print made by Waverly.
The colors are lavender, teal, periwinkle, a darker purple color, and a little bit of lime green. The pattern reminds me of flowers. After MANY hours on pinterest, I decided to make a bird mobile because birds and flowers go together.
Many more hours were spent pouring through bird mobiles before I landed on this one which is supposedly from a Target ad.
As much as I liked it, I felt like the birds looked like airplanes and I just couldn't get past that. Then I began searching for other birds and found this beautiful one (tutorial here).
I tried to make it with felt and couldn't turn it the right way out so I went to regular fabric. Mine aren't as pretty as hers, but that's okay. I also didn't want all of my birds to look the same so I found two other patterns for the other two birds. The purple one is made with her pattern, although I made the tail shorter.
For the glitter detail, I used tacky glue mixed with a little bit of water to thin it out and painted it on with a paintbrush. Then I sprinkled the fine glitter onto the glued areas and hung the bird by the beak to dry. I added glitter to the beaks the following day so the gold wouldn't get mixed into the other glitter. The bird eyes are tiny seed beads I had in my stash, attached with a needle and thread.
I searched for sticks and everything looked really gnarly. Then I noticed the branches on our Gardenia bush and saw how straight they were. I knew they'd be perfect! I used hot glue to put two sticks together. I was going to use felt for the flowers but then I decided to use leftover fake flowers from Dollar Tree. I mostly used white flowers but added some purple and some tiny blue ones along with some leaves. I placed them randomly and used hot glue to attach them.
All that was left was hanging it. I used two hooks because I didn't want it to rotate. Sticks aren't straight though so it was a bit of trial and error for how to center the mobile over the crib and how to make it hang so the stick wasn't closer to the wall on one end than the other. I used fishing line and made a really big loop then hung that loop on both hooks.
A tip for hanging the birds: Start with a 12-18" piece of fishing line and thread that through the bird. Let the bird hang. If it is tilted too far forward or back, pull the line through and put it further forward or back and let it hang again. Keep moving the fishing line until the bird hangs how you want it to. After that, it's just a matter of tying the fishing line to the branch.
This is the completed mobile. I love how dainty and pretty is it!
I think it's important to also consider what the baby will be seeing, so I made sure some flowers were pointing down. This is my little one's view of her mobile.
If you're on a budget and want a pretty mobile, I highly suggest going this route! Heck... Dollar Tree even sells litte birds so you wouldn't even have to make them! All in all, this project cost me $4 for the fake flowers and glitter but technically I already had those on hand so this project was free for me. It took me around 4 hours to complete the mobile, which was a lot less time than I spent deciding what to make!
I hope this inspires you!
