Shelly and her kids make some beautiful mobiles using Activity Village printable templates in this guest blog post.
Making Mobiles
By Shelly
My daughter and I recently spotted the Twirly Heart Mobile on the website and thought it looked so sweet so we just had to give it a go.
We printed the template directly onto coloured cards, cut it out, and add some crafting gems and an elastic string at the top. Super easy and such a stunning result!
Our twirly heart mobile!
We were so happy with the end result that both kids decided it would be fun to try and make some more mobiles. Now I must admit I have not really made mobile crafts before but my kids were eager and it is a great tracing and cutting activity so we tried.
We started with this Star Template. I printed out two copies of the template – one normal size and one reduced size (I reduced the size via the printer settings).
I did one example for the kids – making sure they understood that the template had to be on the fold and then they got tracing and cutting.
Tracing around the star template
Hint – when the kids need to make a hole to thread the string through you can use a hole punch or they can use a blu tack trick – place a small lump of blu tack under the area you want to make the hole and then the kids push the pencil tip through the card into the blue tack below – works well and is an easy and safe method for younger kids to try.
Making a hole using a pencil and a lump of blu-tack
We made two different star mobiles. Our blue mobile we used the larger star as a horizontal base and then we hung five smaller stars down from each of the points of the main star.
Our blue star mobile hanging up
With all of the stars the kids kept the decorating very simple and just stuck some craft gems onto them but you could decorate them however you wanted.
We also tried a different star mobile. This time we kept the main star vertical and hung the smaller stars from the two bottom points.
A beautiful yellow star mobile!
Both mobiles hanging in the window
We also thought it would be fun to try a butterfly mobile. For this we used one of the butterfly templates. We started with the largest size butterfly – traced and cut out 2 copies.
Cutting out a butterfly template ready for tracing around
Tracing the butterfly template
Then we folded the wings back and glued the two bodies to each other creating a 3D effect.
Two butterflies glued together
We also cut out some smaller butterflies – this time my daughter decided to use patterned paper for the smaller butterflies.
We attached the smaller butterflies to the bottom of the wings of the main butterfly.
Butterfly mobile completed!
We used something called elastic string in all the crafts – it is something that I picked up at a local craft shop and my kids like it because we can get it in different colours and it is not as thick as typical string. But you could use normal string or some ribbon.
We also tend to trace our templates onto the different coloured card mainly because I think tracing is a good activity for the kids - but you could easily print the templates directly onto coloured card.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on Maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
