Sponsored by
Cardboard Robot
Do you have bored kids? Do you need a gift for the creative weirdo in your life? Are you the creative weirdo and you’re just now admitting it? At Cardboard Robot, we can help you get what you need to feed your inner maker. We carefully select the best art supplies, craft kits, nice paper, and clever toys for all of your creative, brain-building needs. So…what are you going to make today?
Heart Mobile!
Sponsored by
Cardboard Robot
Do you have bored kids? Do you need a gift for the creative weirdo in your life? Are you the creative weirdo and you’re just now admitting it? At Cardboard Robot, we can help you get what you need to feed your inner maker. We carefully select the best art supplies, craft kits, nice paper, and clever toys for all of your creative, brain-building needs. So…what are you going to make today?
Our friend Evelyn (and her sister Hazel along with Roxie) helped make this paper project for the Summer 2019 Inspire(d). It’s fun because you get to forage for the perfect sticks first, then put the rest of the project together. Check out our how-to here, and have fun!
Supplies:
• Paper of whatever color you’d like
• Paper trimmer (optional – it works great for even sized strips of paper)
• Foraged sticks (cut down to size for the mobile size you’d like)
• Branch cutter for cutting said sticks (the big one was the best for this)
• Stapler
• Scissors
• Yarn, string, or similar
Cut your paper into strips – I had 12 x 12 paper, but you could use 8.5 x 11, and just cut the strips the long way. I cut mine into 1.5-inch strips. The smaller you cut your strips, the smaller your hearts can be.
Once you’ve cut a good number of strips, fold them directly in half, and cut on the fold. (The pieces at the top of the paper trimmer have been cut, the bottom papers have not been cut.)
Now it’s time to make your hearts! Take one of your cut strips, and fold it in half.
Round the top parts and bring the two edges together to form the heart.
Grab the bottom of the heart, and make a good crease. Open the top, rounded part of the heart, and put a piece of string in the middle, and hold that part again. (Evelyn and I discovered it’s best to cut your strings long enough to tie to the mobile, but not too long that it’s hard to know which string is which. The length of the string will depend on your mobile size.)
The goal is to staple the heart so the staple also holds the string in place.
Slide the inside top of the heart out (while the string is still in place) to staple.
Once it’s stapled, roll it back into a heart form. You can adjust the heart a fair amount to your liking.
It should look like the above photo!
Now it’s time to set up your mobile! Play with your sticks ’til it looks how you want it to. Make sure you have enough hearts to balance the mobile out. Tie the top string on with a loop so you can hang the mobile.
Tie the rest of the strings to attach the sticks to each other and form the mobile base.
Lay out the hearts and play with how you’d like them to look. (See what we mean about the strings being too long? Next time we’d trim them while they’re on the ground.)
Hang the mobile up so you can start balancing your hearts. We clipped ours to the bottom of our deck! It might take some doing to get it balanced – move the hearts from the inside to the outside of the sticks, or make the strings shorter, etc, to get the balance just right.
Here it is before we trimmed the strings!
And here it is all done! Thanks to Evelyn, Hazel, and Roxie for the help on this! Hang yours up to twirl slightly in the breeze, or in the window to brighten a gloomy day! Enjoy!
