Having put up a number of tantalising hints as to my Christmas crafting on the blog, I am happy to announce that I can reveal the things I made in the lead-up to the festive period. The first was based on elephants.

Mums Elephant Mobile

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear, we hail from Africa – and Wonder-Mum‘s favourite animal is the elephant. Mollie Makes Issue 15 had a pattern for a brooch, and I decided to get creative with it and turn it into a mobile instead.

I made 9 elephants – four on a small size and five bigger. I used felt to make them, and colour-coordinated their blankets, ears and eyes. The effect was quite fun, and a very satisfying way to indulge my internal colour rules! Once the elephants were done, which took a shockingly small amount of time, I had to string them up and decorate.

I used a polystyrene ring for the main structure of the mobile, and pierced it five times vertically and four times horizontally, with equal spacing between all of the holes. I used a big yarn needle to make the holes.

I strung jewellery wire through the vertical holes and attached African beads to these, with the five large elephants last. The horizontal holes held decorated garden wire, from which I hung jewellery wire attached to the four smaller ellies. The elephants were all hung at different heights to fill in the white space between them.

I covered the polystyrene with yarn, as per a Hobbycraft tutorial, and finally strung the five ends of the vertical wires together to make a loop the whole thing can hang from.

The whole endeavour was enormously rewarding, and was finished relatively quickly. My favourite elephant is this one!

More to come next time – a rainbow trout! Did you make anything over Christmas?

Much love,

Corrie xx