TuTu Cute

I FINALLY got to do it! A tutu mobile!

My BFF and I had planned a craft day. She loved the mobile and 'L' I had made for baby Logan's rooms, and her hubby had requested all of the rest of the letters (the 'ogan' part) to hang above the closet in the nursery. Since the L I made was 12"x12", what I had on hand wouldn't quite work, so we planned to shop it up at Michael's and make a whole craft day of it. The plan was the figure out letters for above the closet, make a fabric book shelf/pocket type thing (BFF recently joined Pintrest and this was her first planned Pintrest project), and since her neighbor had a baby girl about a month ago, I thought this would be the perfect time to try out my TuTu mobile!

We ended up shopping for FOUR HOURS for our projects. JoAnn Fabric and Lowes were our first stops to buy things for the book pocket (a project we never even got to, so that may possibly be another post). Then we went to Michaels where the majority of our time was spent. We had NO IDEA what we were going to get for the letters or the tutu mobile. After fumbling around for different letter options, we ended up with wooden letters about 3"-4" tall, and thin thin canvases about 6"x4". The letters were white so we figured we would paint the canvases then hot glue the letters on top. We grabbed more craft paint in case what I had left from the airplane mobile wasn't enough, and that project was settled.

We spent much more time trying to figure out what to hand off of the tutu mobile. I knew the basics and grabbed a wire wreath form and two spools of pink and white tulle from the wedding section (I knew I needed three spools of ribbon to cover two wire rows on the airplane mobile, so I compared the length of the ribbon to the tulle, and since the tulle was much longer I figured two of those would take care of it). After wandering through the baby and wedding aisles, fake flowers, jewlery, and scrapbooking, we decided on hanging a combination of paper flowers (green because the nursery is pink and lime green) and crystal beads (pink and clear).

The process for the tutu mobile was pretty much the same as the airplane mobile (seen here). I first painted the green wreath form white, then I unrolled each spool of tulle and kept cutting it in half until I had pieces that looked like a good size. Originally I was going to alternate pink and white, but when I pulled the first few pieces up, it looked like I had cut the white ones shorter than the pink, so I decided to do the outside row in white, and the second row in pink (turns out it was just the pieces I picked up, so I could have alternated, but it looks this way too). I'm not sure if I explaned how I did the ribbon in on the airplane mobile, but basically I folded the ribbon/tulle in half, stuck the loop part inside the row I was working on, and pulled the ends through the loop, so the wire was in the middle. I had to hot glue the ribbon in place, but the tulle held on to itself quite well.

As for the hanging part, it was all trial and error. Do something, show BFF, adjust. Every flower had a bead under it to keep it on the line. Some had one or two above/below it, and there were also some beads that were on their own on the line. I have to say, it took me a long time to complete three rows (including hot gluing a dot above and below each bead to be double sure they wouldn't fall off and end up in baby's mouth... eek that would NOT be good). So I passed the job along to the BFF and she found a MUCH better, and faster, way to hold the beads in place by threading the string through the bead, then looping back around and threading it through again (then we'd still hot glue dot it just to be sure!)- I had previously been tying multiple knots on top of each other, till it was big enough to hold the bead. She also came up with more creative ways of alternating bead and flowers. So six strings later and together we eyeballed where they would hang, and how long they would hang (though we did some of this as we were putting them together, so we didn't end up with the all the flowers and beads at the same lengths).

Here's a closer look at the flowers and beads, and the variance in how each was hung:

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To finish off, we hung the strings at the top, and I pulled every other pink piece of tulle from the second row, through the white on the first row to give more color variance, and voila:

I even took a picture to see how it would look to the baby... very pretty!

I was not there when baby's mom came and saw it, but I heard she loved it, and was so surprised that we had made it for her. I have seen her since though, and she is still looking for a place to hang it, but cannot wait to get it up in the nursery.

As for a price breakdown, I unfortunatly forgot to keep the reciept, but my only purchases for this mobile was the two spools of tulle, the wreath form, a box of paper flowers, and two colors of beads (two strings on each). I believe my total came out to be around $25, and the only reason for the higher expense than the airplanes, is that the flowers were $7 for the box, and the beads were around $6 for both. Much more expensive then popsicle sticks and clothespins, though I ddin't have to buy any paint for this one. I do have a string of each color beads left, and about 1/4 of the box of flowers, so I could use those for another mobile (and during this I inadvertantly discovered how to make a palm tree out of the beads and green flowers, and one of my other mommy-to-be friends has palm trees in her nursery bedding, hmm...)