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How to make a paper flower mobile
Plus 3 kits to giveaway!
Why not bring the summer indoors with this fabulous paper flower mobile? Adorn your home with beautiful hand twisted wisteria, thanks to this week’s guest blogger Claire from Heart Handmade UK and her easy steps to make a paper flower mobile.
Blogger and DIY craft tutorial extraordinaire Claire, provides high ROI DIY tutorials on her blog, projects you can make quickly and easily. Claire was the perfect crafter for us to turn to in order to test out our mobile kit and boy were we amazed with Claire’s clever and easy paper flower tutorial!
Wisteria mobile
Materials you’ll need:
Crepe paper streamers (lilac and cream)
Purple watercolour paint (to add varying lilac shades to the cream crepe paper)
Green crafters paint
Faux green hydrangea petals (from pound shop fake hydrangeas, you can have a look at the faux flowers and pick one with green leaves. Alternatively you could make leaves from some green card stock)
Lilac thread
Optional:
Soapy warm water (to bend the wooden dowels)
Plant pot tray and heavy plant pot (to bend the dowels just a little)
Buy Mobile Kit HERE
How to make the hanging wisteria mobile:
I chose only three dowel rods to mimic the way wisteria branches naturally grow. Use hot soapy warm water and allow to soak. You may need to refill with hot water every so often to make the dowels easier to bend (I ended up snapping two).
I shaped these in a plant pot tray and weighed them down with something heavy and allowed to dry. You could use a large bowl instead.
Use a little glue on the end of the dowels and add the beads to each end. Repeat on the other dowels.
When glue has set, paint the dowel rods from your Dannells mobile kit green.
3 Mobile Kits to Giveaway at the end of this post!
Lay out the mobile and decide on the distance between the dowel rods as they hang. I decided that my dowels would be 5cm apart.
When you have decided on the mobile spacing cut strips of the cream paper streamer 3 times the distance between the sections of your mobile. Mine were 5cm apart so I cut 15cm strips of crepe paper. Lightly paint with watercolour paint and allow to dry.
Cut the purple streamers similarly and then cut in half lengthwise. Instead of having one wide, 15cm long streamer, you have two 15cm streamers.
Take one streamer and twist the very end, place the tip of your thumb just beside where the twist is and cup the crepe paper. Twist the streamer about three or four times where it meets the other side of your thumb. This should now make a tiny cupped petal shape.
Repeat until you reach the end of your streamer and twist to finish.
Buy Mobile Kit HERE
To attach to branches:
Create three long streamers, bunch them together and twist in the centre so that they are secured together.
Put over a dowel, twist a few times underneath the dowel rod and secure with thread (I added a double knot).
3 Mobile Kits to Giveaway at the end of this post!
Keep making steamers and attaching to the dowels as you go. You can always trim your streamers to replicate how wisteria hangs. I used this image for reference:
In total I made approximately 30 long streamers.
Take the faux leaves or your homage yardstick leaves, hot glue gun and glue sticks to attach along the top of the dowels. I added petals pointing downwards and a couple pointing upwards.
Buy Mobile Kit HERE
14. Once finished, string the mobile to get it ready to hang. Because I had bent the dowels
I used an extra long piece of thread that reached from one end of the dowel to the other, and a shorter piece up the centre to straighten it. See diagram:
Ta-da! That’s it. I hope you are suitably inspired and are ready to catch wisteria hysteria!
3 Mobile Kits to Giveaway!
For your chance to win one of our fab mobile kits and try this great project at home simply answer the following question in the comments box below this post.*
What is your favourite flower and why?
Want to see more from Claire? See her shabby chic lampshade and base tutorial here. Did you enjoy our How to make a Flower Mobile tutorial? Let us know in the comments below!
Find Heart Handmade UK here:
*Deadline for winning one of three mobile kits is midnight on 22nd August.