Studio Calico: A Butterfly Mobile Tutorial, Part I

As promised, here's a step by step tutorial how I made the butterfly mobile in the June gallery. I think you'll be surprised at just how easy it actually is.

1. Gather your necessary supplies. Those include the following:
paper
scissors
liquid glue
punch/setter tool (I used the Crop-a-dile)
eyelets
paper trimmer
wooden sticks (I used BBQ skewers)
string (I used tatting thread)
semi-heavy beads

2. Snip the ends off the skewers. You don't want to be poking an eye out!

3. Punch a few butterflies out, or whatever shape you'd like to use. I suggest you do quite a few at the beginning of the process, instead of as you are working through it. It shaved off an hour of time when I pre-punched this time around. For this project, I had 9 strings of butterflies, 13 on a string, but they were double sided, so that's 26 butterflies per string, so that would be 234 butterflies punched, give or take a couple. Fabulous way to use up scraps!

4. Cut 5 lengths of string and double knot them to your stick, making sure one's exactly in the middle of the stick and the two on the ends of the stick aren't all the way to the end. I used some 7Gypsies gaffer tape to hold my stick to the counter.

5. Start gluing the butterflies onto the string. I glued them together so the same side of the paper would show on back and front. I only put a small bead of glue down the center, you could totally glue it together, but I figured all I really needed was the butterfly to stay put on the string, but I'm so not a perfectionist!

6. Instead of attaching the butterflies all nice and straight, turn the string just a bit as you attach each one, you'll get butterflies turned all sorts of directions, it'll add character!

7. Add butterflies as desired to all five strings.

8. Now cut two strips of paper you'd like to use to cover the sticks. One should be just a bit wider than the other because when you glue them together, you'll have a stick between them. You can trim off any excess later. Put a big fat bead of glue down the center of one of the strips, center the stick on the strip. Now would be a good time to trim any stray string, or you could be like me and just tuck it into the glue... :)

9.Attach the two strips together, making sure the stick stays centered. Do any trimming you need to. I believe my sticks were about 8 inches long, so I ended up trimming off about 3 inches of paper. Don't trim right up to the stick ends. You'll need a bit of room for the hanging process.