Elephant Mobile

Hello everyone! I hope you all are doing well on this cold morning (at least if you are on the east coast). I forgot to turn my heat on last night and we woke up to a pretty cool house. It was hard getting out from under the covers.

In my last post, I promised to update you on some of the ideas I have been working on for the nursery (now that the world knows the baby is a boy). This first project was started about 3 weeks ago, shortly after we knew the gender. Our theme for the nursery is blue + gray + elephants. My inspiration came mostly from pinterest (shocking).

Some examples:
Blue Elephants

Artwork

Inspiration Board

And there are many more examples out there. In fact, searching for "blue nursery" gives you a lot of elephant inspiration. Since I love elephants and think they are adorable for a baby, I decided to go with the theme. I actually bought the fabric from the first picture (the gray elephant print) to make curtains and a crib skirt (because I am crafty like that and don't want to spend $130 on a crib skirt). 

Back to the project at hand, I really wanted to make a mobile for the crib, since (a) buying a mobile is expense and (b) I am not a huge fan of the ones out there. I picked up some fabric quarters and eighths at JoAnns to make the elephants for the mobile. 

For the pattern, I started with this pattern, which I found online. I ended up lengthening the nose so it curled up more than it does here, but I just did that part by hand. 

 I bought the hoop from JoAnns for about $2. I debated on the hoop size a bit, but I wanted something that could fit a decent amount of elephants and wouldn't look too small next to the crib. I think this was around the right size, but could have been slightly smaller. I bought plain white ribbon and carefully used hot glue to glue the ribbon around the hoop. I used a dot of glue to start and then twisted the ribbon around the hoop. After the start, I would use a small line of glue and then twist about 3 turns of ribbon onto that glue and repeat.

For the elephants, I found the easiest way to cut them was to have the fabric folded during the cut with the elephant pinned to the fabric. I cut about 1/4" from the edge of the pattern to allow room for my seam.

I then sewed right sides together, leaving room for stuffing in the back end.

Flipped around (pre-stuffing). For the stuffing, I used a small rod I had to push the stuffing into the nose area. This process made me feel like I was violating the poor elephants. Once I had the stuffing the way I liked it, I sewed up the rear end (hiding stitches as best I could - not one of my sewing strong suits).

I neglected to take a picture of the process for the ears, but I basically cut out a shape that was about right for the ear size and used that as my pattern. The ears are cut from felt and sewed onto the sides of the heads after I stuffed the elephants. I sewed the ears by hand. 

All my elephants. I tried to use patterns in the blue and gray theme that would be visually stimulating for the baby. 

You can see the completed hoop in this picture. I used ribbon for the structure that goes up to the music box. You can either hot glue the ribbon or tie it to create the structure. I found that hot glue worked better.

I used thread (doubled up) to attach the elephants to the mobile. Attaching them and getting the length right was rather tedious. I also had to find the right center of gravity for the elephants so they didn't tip forward or backward. I think it turned out rather well.

Here is the assembly all together. This is in the closet of the nursery (not the final place for the mobile, but we need to paint the walls first. The white walls give a better background for seeing the whole thing.

The music box was a purchase from ebay. You can search for mobile music box and grab one for about $15. I liked this one because it plays a variety of songs and isn't the wind up kind.

Here is the final product in action! I am pretty excited to see it when we have it set up over the crib and have the walls painted.

Speaking of wall colors, we currently have a plethora of paint samples chilling on our walls. I think once we have the walls primed, I will get a few samples of my favorites and paint them in a bigger area. I am having a tough time deciding between more of a blue-gray wall color or one that leans more towards aqua. I think I'll end up with a blue-gray color, but we shall see. More on that in another post.