Lessons

Lesson Info

Assembling the Mobile Elements

So now that you have completed these three basic structures, we've got your basic cube form, we've got your diamond cube form, and then we've got our little upper hanging structure. You're really ready to go ahead and construct your himal ee mobile. Now, I've spent a little bit of time preparing some additional elements, so I've gone ahead and created eight of the diamonds and too of the little cubes, and I'm going to show you how to tie these all together, so when you're doing this at home, you can actually begin by tying some of the initial elements at your table, but I often find that it's helpful if you can suspend your top hanging structure either from ah, loop on the back, your door, maybe a shower curtain, any sort of thing that's going to keep it a little bit elevated because it's going to help you as you're tying the additional elements onto the corner to make sure that it's balanced and tied properly and not a little bit crooked. So to do that, I've got a quirky little of too...

l that I use, and this is actually a vintage drying rack kind of sets up like a tripod, I use it for building all sorts of mobiles it's got these great little spoke like elements that extend out, and I'm going to use that to build on, so the first thing we're going to do is use our top hanging structure. Now we left our ties from the final tie on the cube, and so in order to be able to string it up, I'm just going to tie and not to create a giant loop. Now you will be able to cut this off and attach a longer piece of string when were completed so that you can adapt it to whatever your ceiling height might be or wherever you're going to suspend the mobile from. So don't worry about that too much at this stage of the game, so you can see have created a little bit of a loop, and I'm going to go ahead and hang that right on my structure now I want to start building down from these four point, and one thing that I have learned in creating these is that if I were to take this and tie it directly to this often times, it gets a little stiff or it ends up hanging at an odd angle. What I found works best is if I had a segment of straw between the points on the hanging structure and the points on my geometric element it's going to give it theobald city to be a little bit more kinetic. Ah little additional movement when it's hanging in a room and the nice thing too about having your final tie tails left on the ends of your geometric forms is that these are going to be perfect too then string it onto your hanging structure if you've cut the's if they're too short not to worry just go ahead cut a segment of the string, tie it around the base whichever end you want to suspend and make sure that your tails air long enough now I have also found that it's easier to work with two tails versus one string if I had to go up through tie it around and tie a knot with this it's a little bit more awkward versus having the two pieces toe loop through the end and tying to or not it just makes it a little bit more simply simple and you're probably end up being a little bit less frustrated in your construction so I'm going to go ahead and grab a a couple of short straw segments have gone ahead and pre cut some of these so what I'm going to do is take my two ends and I'm going to feed them through one of the short straw segments so they both come out it just slides right down nice and neat so well then go ahead and I'm going to tie this point onto this point of the mobile so I'm just gonna loop it through and again on your first mobile be kind to yourself as faras like you're tying technique you're going to get better with it as you construct mohr of thes but you want to tie it loose enough that it's not if I were to tie this really tight there's a possibility that it would like stiffen up and extend off to the side that a little bit of an awkward angle where is if I leave a little bit of room it's gonna hang really elegantly and loosely on the end point there so I've tied one night I'm going to go ahead and tie one additional one to secure it and then those two taels remaining we can just go ahead and sniff those right off so I'm now going to repeat this on the three remaining corners I find that it is helpful when you're constructing the mobile to build opposite one another so since I've tied it on this side I'm going to go over to the opposite corner and tight there it's just going toe keep it a little bit more balanced while you are constructing the mobile and it'll help you tie the elements a little bit more evenly so again I'm just double knotting it to that point grabbing my scissors and clipping off those details and now I'm going to repeat that on these two remaining points all right and then I'm just going to clip off those two last tales you can see it's coming along really nicely, and you can also see how helpful it is to have this suspended while I'm working on it again. It's not impossible to do while it is on your desk top surface, you'll just want to occasionally lifted up to make sure that everything seems to be in alignment. So what I want to do now is I'm going tio attach a couple from the center, and then I think I might do on additional diamond keep hanging on each of the four corners is well, now, obviously if I wanted to, I could loop it over in the other direction and tie them so that the pink portion is towards the top and I actually think that I'm going to do that for these four remaining. So in this case, my last tie on the diamond form was at the very bottom we're going to go ahead and click those guys off so that I now have no strings on here. I'm going to go ahead and cut a little length of my button and craft thread, and I'm just going to tie it through the top portion of the of the diamond, and again, I'm going to kind of center it on the string there so that my tails air roughly the same length. It just makes it a little bit easier to feed through the strong when they are the same length you can see when I tied at one ended up a little bit longer than the other, so I'm just gonna trim it there and then I am going to grab an additional short segment of straw I'm going to feed it through the end as such kind of press that down towards the bottom I then and left again with the two taels making it really easy to tie to the bottom of the upper diamond form take your time with this you don't need to rush that's often when some of the mistakes happen and construction is when you're just you know you've already made five of these six of these whatever the number that you've tied on there and you're just ready to be finished it's when you rush through that oftentimes you end up with them looking a little lopsided or there we go so snipped that off. So now we've got a really nice sort of mirrored image of the diamonds hanging off of one side and you can see even with that additional weight on the upper hanging structure it's not hanging all lopsided it's pretty even these straws are incredibly lightweight, so they're really relatively easy to work with I have seen beautiful himal ee mobiles made out of other materials and in particular brass tubing you often see people will make emily structures out of them and even use them as air plant hangers has been a current trend, and they're actually really beautiful when you're working with the brass, though it's a considerably heavier material, and you just have to be a little bit more cautious in the way that you build so that you make sure that it's balanced. So tripp trimmed off the tales from the bottom tied a new piece to the top, feeding that through one of the short segments of strong, and then I'm going to move to the opposite corner, so I'm just going to rotate it around there, grab that, and we're going to secure this, then to the base of the inverted triangle, the inverted diamond again loose enough, so that hangs nicely. You tie it too tight, it's going to skew off to the side and look a little unbalanced. Trim my tails there. All right, two more to go again. Taking my diamonds is training the base ofthe cutting an additional piece of thread, tying that through the top of the structure. Trim those ends even, and then feed it through another short segment of straw and go to one of the two remaining inverted diamond shapes. Tie this to the base I did want to mention as well as you are constructing you're him early mobile. I kind of had an image in my mind of the combination of elements that I wanted to use the first couple of times you build this, I want to encourage you to play and combine different shapes and color patterns, and one way that you can do that without sort of the permanence of tying the structures together is to bend some paper clips so that you can loosely hook the elements together to get an idea of the shape of the structure that you might like to make. And that way, you can kind of play around with the configuration without the concern that it is permanent and you'd have to cut it apart and start over again. All right, final piece for the outer portion of the mobile and tie it on that remaining trim that end, so our structure looks pretty good at this point on. In fact, you could leave it at this stage of the game if you wanted tio one final thing I do want to do as far as the straw geometric components are concerned is I want to spend another piece down through the center suspending from the bottom of the upper hanging structure, so to do that, I think that I'm going to start with a little pink cube and slide it through. But I've got that extra short segment when you tie that right to the center of the base and again I'm just going to double knot that for security and trim off those two little tails so then from this guy I'm going to suspend one additional diamond piece, so I'm going toe take a little bit of these string gonna tie it, teo the upper portion of my diamond form again sort of centering it is much as you can go in tie that I'm gonna trim my end so they're even and then I'm going to feed it through one final short segment of the straw all rights and then I'm just gonna tie this to the base of that pink cube are right we're in the final stretch, my friends and honestly at this point you could call it a day because I think that this mobile looks pretty good. What I would typically do with this stage is go through and make sure that all of my corners are aligned properly sometimes in the process of constructing the elements the straws get out of alignment, so I just kind of take my thumb and I press it behind each of the intersections to push all of the straws out so they all lined up neatly side by side in this will sometimes happened to it's just sort of the nature of the beast when you are perhaps installing it in a room and hanging it from the ceiling during that process. Sometimes straws get bumped around, and you'll just need to periodically go through and kind of realign them. But I love these family mobiles. I think they look great. You could do him in a variety of color combinations. One final thing I do want to show you, though, is a way to create tassels. The himal ee mobiles are lovely in their nordic simplicity. They're really sort of sparse and minimal. You don't often see them with a lot of ornamentation, but I have found that suspending tassels off of some of the lower portions of it can kind of warm it up. And, depending on your dick core in the space you want to hang it in, it can add a really lovely element to them.