Paper Airplane Mobile

This nifty and very easy to make mobile is now hanging in a corner of the our completed nursery.  Hooray for a finished and lovely space for baby!  I will give you a tour of the rest of his room in due time.

To make this mobile I simply found an interesting stick from our yard and cleaned it up a little.  I trimmed the ends to shape it, and then wiped it off in preparation for painting.  I used a high gloss red spray paint to cover the entire stick – this color is a theme throughout his room.  There are some interesting areas of black that poke through from underneath the red due to the texture of the bark.

Then, with the help of Eric and this fun (er, challenging) book, Awesome Paper Planes, we made a few paper airplanes.  By we, I mean Eric.  I have always struggled with origami and anything that involves precision folding and following step-by-step directions.  My cranes always turn out mangled and sloppy.  I always feel bad about this lack of skill, because every year I have a student who is dying to try origami and I have yet to master the most basic projects.

To assemble the mobile, we hung the branch from a small hook installed in the ceiling.  Then, I hand sewed three lengths of thread through each airplane.  These three pieces of thread create a triangular shape – think like the stability of three legs of a stool.  The three strands help each airplane hang like it is flying.  Each airplane was then tied on to the branch.  It is soothing to watch the mobile spin slowly in a breeze and look forward to rocking my son under it.