Thursday, 5 April 2018

Seasonal Mobiles Tutorial

 
I don't have a little table to use at school to create seasonal displays, so I decided to make seasonal mobiles instead. These were lots of fun to make as I enjoy going through my stash of pom poms, flowers, ribbons feathers and beads. A little while ago I had had a go at making ribbon flowers and felt flowers, because I wanted to learn how to do them. But then I had ribbon and felt flowers floating around my craft room for months and I didn't know what to do with them or where to put them.  Well these mobiles solve all those problems!
 I used these bamboo embroidery hoops to create the mobiles, and wrapped ribbon around them.
 Chiffon ribbon. This ribbon is transparent, but when you overlap the ribbon and keep the wraps tight and secure, you don't notice it.
Begin by wrapping the ribbon around the hoop. Overlapping the ribbon as you wrap it keeps it secure.

I wrapped a little bit of thread around the ribbon when I had finished wrapping it, to secure it.
Begin wrapping leaves and flowers around it. I had some wire koru which I wrapped around the spring mobile.





These were fake flowers that I had pulled apart to create a variety of crafts and flower fairies, and I was left with fabric flowers with a hole in the middle. I solved this problem by running a piece of thread through the hole; threaded a bead that was larger than the size of the hole onto the thread;
and ran the thread back through the hole again, pulling the bead into the centre of the flower.


Continue adding flowers and embellishments. I used pinks, purples and yellows to create the themed spring mobile.
For the summer mobile, I wrapped a fake vine around the hoop once I had wrapped it in ribbon.
Add fake summer flowers and leaves to your mobile. 
For this autumn mobile, I began wrapping copper coloured ribbon around the hoop.
I used felt leaves, orange and red feathers, needle felted toadstools, and ribbon roses in gold and orange.
To hang the feathers, I wrapped the end of them in thread and tied it to the mobile.
I added an autumn coloured fairy to the centre of the mobile.

For this winter themed mobile, I threaded white pom poms onto white thread and hung them from the embroidery hoop.
I used other embellishments including beads; sparkly blue yarn; a pipecleaner snowflake dipped in PVA and sprinkled with glitter; a white felt decoration; white feathers; a polystyrene ball dipped in glitter.