How to Make a Starry Night Mobile

This is a Guest Post by the super amazing One Hundred Dollars a Month reader Mel. She’s back this week sharing her tutorial for the starry night mobile she made for her nursery. {It’s so cute!!}

Mel has contributed oodles of posts over the past few years which include:

• A Freezer Meal Menu Plan for Four Month’s Worth of Meals
• Big List of Freezer Meal Recipes and Freezer Meal Cooking Tips
• Mini Sewing Room Makeover
• DIY Polymer Clay Christmas Ornament Ideas and Tutorial
• How to Make Cloth Gift Bags
• DIY Lemonade Concentrate
• Super Simple Summer Tomato Pasta
• Experience Joining a CSA and Eating More Vegetables
• How to Make Apple Cider with a Press

Here is her latest post:

Okay, I’m going to level with you all: I have really not gone out of my way to save money on baby stuff. I’ve done what I could here and there to save, find deals, and DIY, but I’ve had too much to do and too many issues finding things in stock to really prioritize saving.

On the other hand, when I started shopping for amobile for our nursery, I just could not quite fathom spending $70-$200, which seemed to be the going rate on Etsy, and the mass-produced ones weren’t much cheaper.

I realize Etsy sellers in particular need to turn a profit, and the products are beautiful and handmade, but we had to start from scratch for the nursery (fresh paint, all new furniture, no hand-me-downs, etc.), so that price point was just a little too steep for a single item that I could make myself.

As a result, I decided to make the mobile instead of buying one.

In addition to saving a little money, designing the mobile myself allowed me to make it to my own specifications.

I decided that I wanted something that avoided fabric (so it would be easier to dust), could not get tangled (so that I could store it until we got around to hanging it), relied on a premade frame (so I would not have to mess with figuring out how to space items on the mobile in order to get it to balance), and had detachable elements (so that I could potentially update it down the road if we redecorate the room).

With those goals in mind, here are the materials I chose:

• A mobile kit (my kit also came with some wooden beads)
• Wood cutouts with two pre-drilled holes each (I also used some with one hole)
• S-hooks (mine came in a package with some of the cutouts)
• Acrylic paint
• Foam paintbrushes
•  Thread, twine, cord, or ribbon (to hang and also to attach the top cutouts to the frame)
• Hot glue gun and hot glue (not pictured)

I already had the paint, brushes, thread, some cutouts, and a glue gun, so the entire project cost about $27.00, but I had tons of materials leftover.

Instructions:

1. Figure out how many strings you want to hang from your mobile and how many wood cutouts/beadsyou want each string to have. The frame that came with my kit had 8 pre-drilled holes (4 outer holes and 4 interior ones), so I decided to do 8 strings.

I decided to do 5 star cutouts and 1 moon on each of the outer strings and then 2 star beads, 4 star cutouts, and 1 moon on each of the interior strings.

2. Paint your cutouts.

I liked the sort of ombre-looking mobiles I saw online best, so I used that idea as a starting point. I didn’t end up doing true ombre, but I basically painted one or two cutouts/beads for each string in each of the colors that will be used in the nursery (navy, blue, turquoise, gray, and white) and planned to arrange them in order from lightest to darkest.

In the picture above, you can see how I laid out the pieces for each string so that I could go down the line painting a row of navy, then blue, etc. I also painted the mobile frame white to match. I had to do two coats on each side of each cutout and then go back and paint the edges.

3. Attach the top cutout for each string to a hole in the mobile frame using thread/cord/ribbon and hot glue.

On the strings that just used cutouts, I ran the thread through the top hole of the top cutout, fed both ends through the hole in the frame, and then used hot glue to secure the thread to the frame. On the strings where I used beads, I ran the thread through the first cutout below the beads, then ran both ends through both beads, and then through the frame, securing them with hot glue.

Once the hot glue sets, you can trim the excess thread. (Note: hot glue does eventually degrade, so you might want to pick a more durable glue or simply tie the thread to the frame if that’s a concern.)

4. Attach the remaining wood cutouts to each other using S-hooks, and then use another S-hook to attach the top cutout in each string to each of the cutouts already affixed to the frame with thread and hot glue in Step 3.

The S-hooks are the reason why most of the cutouts (except for the moons at the bottom) needed to have two holes—it allowed me to string the cutouts together with S-hooks.

5. Attach a piece of ribbon to the eye hook on the top of the mobile frame and hang the mobile.

Our nursery is still not ready for me to hang things, so in this case the mobile is just hanging from a drawer in my kitchen, and I eventually moved it to a hanger in the nursery closet.

When we get a bit further along with the nursery, it will probably hang over the chair in the reading nook since I have another plan for the crib.

~Mel