For a little change, I am skipping a mention of food today. It’s hard for me, I love food! Baby loves food too, and I feel like I’m eating for three or four rather than just us two these past few days. But I still love a creative challenge, so today I am still going to share something I’ve made!
Perhaps it’s the nesting phase, but I really like the idea of making something for my baby. Something lovingly made, by me, with (minimal) swearing involved.
But I’m no fool -I know that past attempts at crafts haven’t always worked out to my advantage. I’m sure there are countless scraps of crap handcrafted clothes and things scattered around my childhood home, mostly unfinished and all unwearable. So I decided to stick to something pretty simple this time around. Something that even I couldn’t eff up if I tried.
It had to be something the baby would use, but preferably not try to eat. Or poop on. Now, with children, this really does limit the possibilities, as I’ve been told that that is pretty much what all children do, about 99% of the time (although they are wonderful at multi tasking -doing all this eating and pooping whilst also being adorbs).
Finally I decided on a hanging mobile. Baby can look but not touch, so I don’t have to worry about using materials that might be inhaled or chewed on or all that other scary stuff. Baby can just stare at it!
Being in Paris, I always wanted something to remind baby of Australia -baby’s other home. So the theme of the mobile had to be Australian animals, bien sur!
First up, I had to find something to hang the animals off of. I read all kinds of blogs which mentioned wire, embroidery hoops and clothes hangers could be used and hung from the ceiling, but I wanted something that would attach to baby’s crib instead (I had nightmares of the mobile coming loose and landing on baby’s face….). Turns out you can buy the pieces for a hanging baby mobile online on amazon and ebay, but after you factor in postage they become hideously expensive. In the end I just bought the cheapest complete baby mobile I could find and took the toys off it!
I found this at a local Aubert shop (baby gear shop in Paris) on sale for around 15 euro. bargain!
Next up I needed fabric. I wanted to use felt, it comes in heaps of bright colours and is relatively cheap, not to mention it’s quite a sturdy fabric, almost like cardboard. Once I figured out it was called ‘feutrine’ in french (ahh thanks Google Translate) I found an arts/crafts store nearby my house which sells it for under 1 euro per A4 sized piece. (http://www.rougier-ple.fr/tissu-feutrine-chenille.r.html?pageSize=200&f=att_660:18057).
Feutrine!
I wanted the animals to look a bit 3D, so rather than just cut the shapes out and leave it at that, I decided to stitch them up as proper stuffed toys. For that I needed stuffing (duh). Of course, that was pretty hard to figure out in French, if you type ‘stuffing’ into Google you get all kinds of stuff, none of which is helpful in this case! Eventually I asked french hubby, using a mix of charades and miming to describe it (just you try to explain what stuffing is when you can’t use the word ‘stuffing’!!).
Once we figured it out, we had to find a shop that sold it. Turns out, that’s not easy. No arts/crafts shops sold it, neither did the fabric shops.
I was about to be thwarted in my crafty task by some fluffy white polyester!
At last, I came across a shop in Montmartre that sells ‘mousse’…..not something delicious to eat (I could really go for some chocolate mousse right now….) but the kind of stuffing you put in couches. Hooray! That will work just fine. Sure, I had to buy a GINORMOUS bag of the stuff, but at least I’ll have some for next time! http://www.saint-pierre-decor.fr/
mousse! not the chocolate kind unfortunately…
Now that we’re ready to create……I actually didn’t think this part through. I figured it would be dead easy to cut out all the little animals shapes and sew them together, right?…..uh not so much.
This is my supposed ‘wombat’
So it kinda looks like a wombat….
…..or a wombat with a hunchback…..
A wombat and a…donkey? not very Australian!
maybe stuffing it will make it better…
uh yeah, no….stuffing didn’t make it better.
Perhaps a face will make it look more wombaty? Turns out nope. Looks like a dog.
Woof.
So that didn’t work out well. Luckily some of the animals fared a little better:
At least they look like a cockatoo and a galah, right??
and I perservered until I ended up with all these little critters:
swan on drugs, GIANT headed koala and what seems to be a cross between a kangaroo and a rabbit.
Now, to attach them to the mobile…..
First I got rid of the other animals
Look at those animals sitting there looking all made professional like..pffft.
So what do I string the animals up with? What a weirdly hard question to answer. I had wool (too thick), shoelaces (ugly!), and string at my disposal. A quick internet search revealed to me that nylon fishing line is almost impossible to find in Paris (and pricey, when you do actually find a shop that sells it), so I eventually just settled on the string. I also sewed some felt leaves through the strings to make it look a bit prettier (these animals needed all the help they could get to look pretty).
The result? Voila!
So actually it’s really hard to take a picture of a moving hanging mobile when you also have to hold it up….
Anyone else notice that the birds are a million times bigger than the rest of the animals? This is a fact that I choose to ignore (so I don’t have to go back and try making them again)
All this Making Stuff business got me hungry again….so yes it did end up as a blogpost with food in it, because I couldn’t resist making myself these little pumpkin pie tarts:
Yum!
At least I stuck to just three right?? Ahem… six. But they are only little!
I hope baby likes the mobile, and doesn’t grow up scared of Aussie animals because of it…. If she does, ooops.
Upside down in Paris 