Bring spring into your home with this Paper Butterfly Mobile. This small butterfly mobile is made with a piece of cardboard and various paper scraps, so it's a great way to use up paper you have around the house.
Materials:
- Needle
- Thread
- Bottle Cap
- Butterflies cut or punched from a variety of papers
- Strip of thin cardboard
- Hole punch
- Scissors
- Pencil
- Ruler
- Adhesive
Instructions:
- If you need to, punch out or cut out your butterflies from the paper you've chosen.
- Once you have a large selection of butterflies, you can start stitching them together by hand or use your sewing machine to form a strand filled with them, as shown below. Vary the number of butterflies you put on each strand between 6-9 on each. Be sure to leave an extra bit of thread at the top of each strand so you can tie them to the mobile.
- Now you can start making the framework of the mobile. Cut a strip of thin cardboard approximately 1 1/4 inches wide and however long you wish - depends how large you want your mobile to be. We just used the backing from a pad of paper for this. To create the scallop edge you could use large scallop edge scissors, a scallop border punch, etc. If you don't have those on hand, use a bottle cap to trace a series of half circles along the edge of the cardboard strip. Cut them out, forming the scallop edge and using a regular hole puch to make a hole inside each half circle to create the faux eyelet border. Next, attach the ends of the cardboard strip together to form a hoop.
- Now punch four evenly spaced holes along the top edge of the hoop and attach four lengths to the cardboard by threading through each hole. Once you've attached each string to the top of the hoop, trim each one so they're all even in length and secure them together. You can tie them all in a knot, making sure the knot falls in the center of the hoop so the mobile will hang level. Now you can begin joining the strands of butterflies to the hoop through the eyelet holes you punched earlier.
