Baby balloons: baby's first mobile

As promised, there have been more makes for the baby and the nursery.

I have now started my maternity leave and so after a very busy Christmas where Mr Jones and I worked very hard to get the nursery together I am now home alone with a long (and still growing) list of projects that I would love to get completed before baby Jones makes an appearance.

One of my first projects was taken from a tutorial by HowJoyful: http://www.howjoyful.com/2012/07/nursery-felt-hot-air-ballon-mobile-tutorial-and-pattern/

How Joyful's mobile: my inspiration

I loved the look of this and set about making my own interpretation:
 

The first two balloons

Attached to an existing mobile frame

A bit too close together and missing baskets & clouds?

This was a good project as you can pick it up and put it down easily and play around with the patterns. I spent a few evenings in front of the TV while making these and even took it along to a meet-up with friends.

I think I still need to work on it to get it looking as good as Joy's. I thought that it would be easier to buy a cheap mobile frame and add my balloons but I now think it needs more work (changing the top part for starters). As I don't know when baby Jones will arrive I have kept it as is for now while I finish off a few other projects around the house but think I will return to it if I get the chance.

Love,
Mrs Jones
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Impending motherhood...over the rainbow

This has been my biggest sabbatical from the blog to date and a lot has changed since the last post..

In May Mr Jones and I were very excited to find out that we were having a baby. We were also very nervous and wanted to make sure that everything was OK before we started to buy things for her (yes, apparently it is a pink one!) so it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that we started to think about the nursery.

Our first make was a rag rug rainbow for the wall.

I'm not sure where the idea came from but I could picture it quite clearly so I got some newspaper out and started to design the pattern, dusting off my flexi rule and set square. It isn't complicated it just took some thought as to the width of the bands and the size of it.

From this I marked the design onto some hessian and then started to collect bags of scraps. This involved sorting through all of our 'for the charity shop' bags of clothes and cutting up any of the bright clothing. It also means that for a few weeks Mr Jones was very scared about what would go missing from his wardrobe while he wasn't looking!

Mr Jones was the first to take the leap into the actual rag-rugging and then I largely took over from there.

Miraculously, I even remembered to take some progress shots so here they are along with the finished product:

The design drawn out onto hessian

Mr Jones makes a start on the blue band

Mr Jones in progress

Blue section complete

Nearly there...

Close up of the top

Close up of the bottom

It's current position (it will eventually make it on to the wall)

I'm really happy with it.

I'm sure there will be many more baby makes to follow in the next few months but for now I just want to say sorry for the big gap in posting and see you all again soon.

Love,

Mrs Jones
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