Babies + Beads = Bad News

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Towards the end of December, my sister and brother-in law will be welcoming their first baby (screaming and excessive hand clapping) and clearly, I couldn't be more excited!  Beings that they have an abundance of self control - opposite of myself - they have chosen to find out their baby's gender at delivery.  According to completely unscientific reports, about 40% of couples take the same approach as my sister....we'll call it the "wait and see."  For the record, I think it's a girl.

Since they don't know the baby's sex, the nursery is gender neutral with grays and yellows, whites and wood tones.  Anne has found a few cute things throughout her pregnancy with elephants on them to decorate the nursery, so when I stumbled up these elephants at World Market, I immediately thought - BABY MOBILE!

I picked up an embroidery hoop (after bringing the hoop home, I stained and sealed it) and some some yarn to hang the elephants from.

To begin, I painted a metal washer with some turquoise acrylic paint and then hung it from our dining room chandelier.  This way, I could suspend the embroidery hoop from it so I could tie each elephant on the mobile.

With my washer dangling from the light fixture, I cut two equal lengths of yarn, fed them through the washer and tied them to the embroidery hoop with a few knots.  Now we were ready to start attaching elephants.

Before we could get started on the elephants, we had to address one small problem - or rather, about 75 small problems.  Beads.  Lots of them.  Which meant the string of elephants needed to be deconstructed and re-assembled WITHOUT said beads. 

I started by snipping the threads that held all of the elephants together to discard the beads.

With the beads out of the way, I used some gold thread and an embroidery needle to tie a knot which would suspend the elephant - side note here: had NO idea what an embroidery needle even was until I found one in my sewing kit and realized it would work perfectly for this project!

 Tie a couple knots here.

 And you should end up with an elephant swinging by a string.

 At this point, I just started tying the elephants onto the embroidery hoop until it was balanced and full.

I would have loved to have taken some photos of the mobile hanging above baby's crib - but my sister lives 4 hours away, so that ain't happenin'.  Luckily, there is a hook above Brent's side of the bed, so he gets to stare at a baby mobile while he goes to sleep each night until we can deliver it to it's rightful owner.

Hopefully baby likes it and doesn't develop a life long fear of elephants!