Full of Hot Air... Balloons

About a month ago my mom and sister threw me a baby shower. We pulled a bunch of ideas from Pinterest for decorations... the easier they were, the better they came out.

Don't get me started on the diy cake that left me in tears.

But with some paper doilies, a small wreath and some pink ribbon from the dollar store and fishing wire that we had on hand, I whipped together a few mobiles to hang from the ceiling. I brought them home and ended up hanging one of them in a corner on Rosemary's side of the room:

I clearly spent a lot of time untangling and prepping the mobile for this photo.

But it wasn't fair that there was a handmade (albeit SUPER simple) mobile on Rosemary's side of the room, and not one in Tony's corner.

So I searched Pinterest for a super simple one to match, in a boyish theme.

Inspiration:

Hot Air Balloon Mobile

But of course, I couldn't just follow directions like a sheep, could I?

Here's what I used for Supplies:

1 willow wreath form (Dollar Tree)
2 pieces of blue tissue paper (on hand)
1 roll of blue ribbon (on hand, originally bought at Hobby Lobby)
White thread (on hand)
4 sheets of card stock in different shades of blue (on hand)
Hot glue gun
Cotton balls

With the mobile I'd made for the baby shower, I just threw together some things that I had thrown into the cart at the Dollar Tree, one of which was this:

This was the only "wreath form" the Dollar Tree had, so I went with it as usual. The circle is irregular, and dips and bulges in spots, but it's functional which is what I value most.

So to match the pink mobile on Rosemary's side, I covered a second willow wreath form in blue ribbon (that I'd had laying around from some wedding decor supplies). Since the ribbon was transparent I had to wrap some blue tissue paper around the wreath first and then I added the ribbon:

I wrapped it. Not beautifully, or symmetrically, but it's wrapped. As I told my sister (and she's now parroted back to me way too often) "Vogue will not be coming into this room".

Then using some heavy poster-feeling packaging paper, I made a template of a hot air balloon. I used this to cut balloon shapes out of all my card stock paper in different shades of blue, folding the template and paper in half to make them more symmetrical. I got six balloons out of each sheet, which ended up being more than I needed. I made my balloon shapes significantly bigger than the inspiration mobile, and I used less balloon shapes (4 vs 6) to create each 3D balloon.

Keeping the balloon paper shapes folded in half, I hot glued one side of the balloon shape to a half of another balloon shape. I glued 4 balloon shapes to each other total, and before gluing the last halves, I glued a length of white thread into the middle. Make sense? Like this:

 I made four 3D balloons:

 ...and a mess.

Then this is where I put my own spin on it. I decided to make some clouds.

I wanted a little bit of structure so that they would hang the way I wanted them to, so I made a little form for them out of some of the card stock pieces I had lying around:

Then I gently pulled and rearranged the cotton balls into cloud shapes and hot glued them to both sides of the form. I used about 8 cotton balls per cloud, 4 on each side:

Make sure to hot glue some thread to hang them with, before you glue all the cotton balls together.

That was the hard part. All I did after that was to arrange the balloons and clouds at the heights and lengths I wanted them and hot glued the ends of the thread to the willow wreath form.

To hang it, I cut two lengths of thread the same size and glued each end of the threads on four spots on the wreath. Then I grabbed the middle of the threads and hung them from a hook. I didn't take any pictures of the hanging method, so here's the top of the mobile cropped:

I hung the mobile up, took some really bad pictures, and then put off writing a post about this because the pictures were so bad.

I tried again today, using manual mode and a few tips I found on the internet that I probably don't fully understand... Go with it, right?

Natural light is suppose to drastically improve photos, unfortunately the one window in this room has a lot of branches and greenery in front of it, so natural light is hard to come by.
 

 

Tony likes to kiss his reflection good night...

 Now they've both got a mobile... although I'm wondering if I've outdone Rosemary's mobile. Maybe I should add some flowers to hers?

Sounds very "If you give a mouse a cookie."...