Miniature mobile for a little girl’s room (half scale tutorial)

I just finished the bay window trim in the Victorianna’s little girl’s room, realizing too late that the header is crooked (it’s higher on the left than on the right).

I thought hanging something from the ceiling near the right side of the header might distract from the crookedness. I looked online for miniature mobiles or dream catchers that would work in half scale, but wasn’t really finding what I wanted. So I made my own! (And now you can, too!)

Here are the basic supplies, from Michaels: head pins, Bead Landing Pemberley flower charms, and Bead Landing Specialty Findings (bead caps). I can’t find the flower charms on their website, but you could use other beads in place of these.

Other materials that I already had in my stash are a Peruvian ceramic bead shaped like a fairy (Shipwreck Beads is a good source for these), silver seed beads, and one decorative headpin, because the hole at the bottom of the fairy was too big for the regular headpin. An alternative would be to use a regular head pin with a bead at the bottom, to keep the fairy from slipping.

The bead caps came in three styles — two flat ones and a round one. I used the two flat ones, with seed beads in between to space them out. The larger bead cap’s hole is actually big enough to slip over the seed bead so I used a spacer I had leftover from another project underneath the larger cap. Again, you could use any bead here as long as it’s large enough that the cap doesn’t slip over it.

The mobile will have the fairy at the center, with flowers surrounding her. The flower charms have a jump ring attached to them, and also have a hole up the center.

I removed the jump rings with wire snips. (And then, of course, I saved them for future use!)

Next I inserted a head pin through the hole. You can see how any bead would work fine for this, it doesn’t have to be a flower.

I created a bend in the head pin by wrapping it around a toothpick.

Then I slipped the head pin into one of the holes in the bead cap, using needlenose pliers and my fingers to tighten the loop, and snipped off the tail. The larger bead cap has twelve holes that you can hang things from and I alternated every other hole.

I alternated colors and put them at varying heights. When the flowers were finished I put all the pieces together, bent the top of the decorative headpin into a hook, and cut off the excess. I ended up using another spacer bead on top of the big bead cap to help keep it flat; otherwise, it wanted to tip over (presumably because my hanging flowers aren’t precisely balanced like they would be in a real mobile).

I added an eye hook to the ceiling to hang the mobile from. It’s a small one, but in half scale it looks huge!

Bothered by the giant eye hook, I pulled it out and inserted a cut-down eye pin instead. The hole is bigger than the wire but I glopped it up with tacky and super glue, so hopefully it’ll stay put.

Here’s the mobile in place. Because it’s made with wires instead of string, if it hangs funny you can bend the wires into a better position.

I’m not sure if this has the desired effect of pulling your eye away from the crooked header, but I like it anyway!

It’s going to be a colorful room…