Butterfly Mobile/Chandelier for Nursery

The husband and I have been working on our little nursery a lot lately.  Even though our daughter does not arrive until December we are just too excited not to work on it!  We are trying not to be too girly and frilly with the nursery, that is just not our styles.  However, one very girly thing I found was this awesome mobile/chandelier from Potterybarn Kids.

It is discontinued though! So the husband and I decided to make our own version for the nursery.  

Now ours does not look exactly like the Potterybarn one, but we love it just the same:)  Here is a close up view of it:

And here it is over our crib:

We got the lovely butterfly decals from NouWall, an AWESOME etsy shop!  

If you would like to make your own butterfly mobile/chandelier this is how we did it:

Materials:

*  2 packs of silk thread (we used Jewelry Essentials brand)

*1 pack of small glass beads (once again we used Jewelry Essentials brand)

*1 needle 

*A circular hoop for the base of the mobile.  (We used the top ring of a lampshade and just cut away all of the fabric-you could also use an embroidery hoop.)

*White sturdy craft paper (I used white scrap paper and painted it white to make it even sturdier)

*A jumbo punch of a butterfly or whatever animal/design you wish to make for your mobile (sadly I could not find a jumbo butterfly punch in the size I wanted so I hand cut every butterfly!!!)

*1 swag hook and anchor to drill into the ceiling (we got ours at Home Depot in the nuts and bolts/hardware section)
*1 S hook to hang the mobile to the swag hook

Procedure:

*To begin I painted my craft paper with designs in white paint.  You could use any color you wanted or you don't even have to paint your paper.  Your choice!

*Next I cut a stencil of a butterfly and began tracing onto the back of my painted papers.  I seriously cut out about 90 butterflies!  If you can find a craft punch to do this that was about 2 inches both ways that would be awesome!

My little butterflies!

 

 

 *Once the butterflies were cut out, it was time to assemble them. 

*First figure out how long you want the strands of your outer ring of your mobile to be.  Cut the silk thread to the length of your choice.  The amount of strands will vary depending on how big your mobile will be.  We spaced our strands 2 inches apart and ended up with 16 strands for our outer ring.

* Once we knew how long our strands would be (ours were about 12-14 inches depending on how many butterflies were on each strand) we began to string our butterflies onto each strand.  To do this you need a needle to poke a hole in each butterfly.  

*We rotated stringing 3 and 4 butterflies on every other outer strand and made them 2 inches apart.  A stopper knot was tied to keep the butterflies in place on the strand.

*At the very end of the last butterfly on each strand we placed a small clear bead to give it a finished look.

*Once the outer ring is complete begin on the inner rings.  Our base let us only have two inner rings.  So our second ring had 5 butterflies and our most inner ring had 6 with 1 strand of 7 hanging down in the middle.

*Once all of your butterflies are strung and hung, it is time to hang your mobile/chandelier.  

The husband did this for me..I am not the best  at hanging things!  He first took 3 strings and tied them into a point at the top of the mobile.  He then knotted it to the S hook.  Finally he drilled the swag hook and anchor into the ceiling.  Finally!  We were done!

So there you have it!  I hope this tutorial was kind of helpful! 

Well I am off to work on some artwork for this nursery!  Have a great day:)