We have a new grand baby in the family, so we thought it would be nice to make a gift for her.  So Alex and I had a think, and came up with the plan to make a baby’s mobile.  Now we don’t know about you, but we absolutely love rainbows.  Their colourful display are enough to brighten anyone’s day.  As the baby’s Dad is from Wales but they live in Yorkshire, we also thought it might be nice to also incorporate some Welsh driftwood into the project to represent the baby’s Welsh roots.

When thinking of the design, we also thought we would add some clouds, to give context to our rainbow, but being quite novice felters, we opted to do needle felted clouds, so they would appear light and fluffy.  We started by making a template to represent the base of the clouds, as when we look up into the sky, clouds often appear to have a flat base, with plumes of fluffy clouds above.

 

 

We wanted a rough design to follow, so that we ended up with a cloud the size we wanted.  We needle felted some cloud shapes out of an off-white wool.  Unfortunately, it didn’t have a label for us to identify the type of wool!!  Once we had a layer of cloud, we could then start to build upwards…

We continued to make small clouds, which we then added to our base…

Alex had a go at needle felting once it was assembled.  There was less risk of him stabbing his fingers by this stage!!

We decided that it would be lovely to have some lights inside our cloud.  We bought some battery operated LED lights, which were small enough to fit inside.  We bought off white, warm white and multicoloured, but in the end decided on the multicoloured lights to reflect the rainbow colour scheme!

We pushed some of the lights down into the base layer of cloud, and hid the rest in amongst the top layers of cloud.

But we needed to have access to them in order to operate the light switch and be able to change the batteries.  So we left an access hole in the top of the clouds…

The next step was to make the felted balls.  We used 3 grammes of wool per ball and tried a few different methods.  Firstly Alex had a go at hand felting them, but as he doesn’t know his own strength, it was difficult to keep them circular!

So we then tried using a salad spinner to gently tumble them…

But although this worked quite well, they still looked like they needed some more felting so we tried bubble wrap to cushion the pressure of hand felting…

Success!! We ended up with some really well felted balls that were fairly round and even…

Having finished both the clouds and the rainbow, it was time to start assembling our mobile…BUT….disaster struck!!!  When we went to pick up our rainbow of balls, we were missing a green one.  Now where could it have gone to?? Two minutes before, it was right beside us and now it had vanished.  We started to look everywhere and after about 20 minutes of moving furniture and searching three rooms, we found it…..

How could one little ball end up so big and fluffy?  I even weighed it to check it was the same ball but yes, it weighed 3 grammes, the same weight as the original.  There was only one explanation…..

Not content with the numerous homemade felted mice he has been given, Elliot was determined to get his claws into the rainbow.  We should have known, as he spotted them in the making!!!  So – we then had to make another one to replace it, which set us back a few hours while we waited for it to dry!  But in the end, we were able to assemble our felted rainbow mobile and Alex is very happy!!!

And the lights look amazing!!!

We would like to try this project again, but using wet felting for the cloud.  It will be good to compare the two.  It was a fiddly project to make, including trying to balance everything to ensure that it hung straight!! But all in all, we are very pleased with how it finally turned out.  But I think next time, we will be hiding the raindrops from Elliot!!!