Nursery Decor: Bird Mobile

When I did the hollow yarn balls I had another project in mind. This bird mobile. 

First I needed to do some prep work (I did this while the yarn balls were drying). The sticks are from my backyard so I scrubbed them down to get the dried moss off and then I ran them through the dishwasher (using the heat dry) to kill any bacteria that may have been on there.

I hot glued the two sticks together and wrapped a long piece of fishing line criss-crossing around the joint. I used the excess line to make a loop for hanging.

To attach the yarn balls I first attached the largest one to the branches with a long piece of fishing line. Then I attached the smallest one to the largest ball with the same piece of line, looping through string on both balls. I did the same to cascade the other two. There are some yarn balls hanging directly from the branch ends by their own piece of line.

Staggering the heights and location of the balls gave it a more organic look. To play off the "abstract nest" look of the yarn balls I added birds to the mobile. I did this using my cricut expression, but if you are patient enough you could hand cut them out. For those of you cricut users I used the Give A Hoot cartridge.

The birds are cut at 2" (making them 2"x4"). For each bird you need two wing layers, two bird layers and two bird shift layers, mirror one of each layer.

The bird shift layer just adds an eye hole. I used the same paper for all layers except the wing layer (I only used the middle of this layer) in which I used the alternate paper used for the other birds. I hope this is making sense, I am typing this and am getting confused :)

To glue them together I used hot glue to give them dimension. When both sides are glued separately, glue them together with hot glue sandwiching the fishing line. I only have one that is on its own line, the others are using the line dangling a yarn ball.

I tried to get every angle to show just how dimensional this piece is. I just love how it turned out!