The Mobile Hanging Process –

Today a number of items arrived that I identified as being useful for my mobile. I felt that black elastic bands might secure the pieces in place better than tape. I also ordered some phone charm strings and some swivel head keychain clasps. Below is a picture of my ‘haul’.

New Hanging Items

The items shown below contain tiny black eyelets sat on top of the box they came in. There are also some swivel head clasps and some phone charm strings. I have threaded together the swivel clasps using a phone charm string to illustrate how each bar of the mobile will be held in place. The large circular key rings will be used to suspend the zero elements of the mobile.

I tried stringing one line of the mobile this evening using the new items.  It has made an immeasurable difference.  It will now be so much easier to standardise the thread lengths because the phone strings are already a uniform length. Also with the zero elements now secured using the tiny eyelets everything will now stay in place.  I was extremely hard trying to balance everything when many of the elements, particularly the zeros were constantly moving around.

I’m now rapidly approaching my 200th blogpost, so I’m hoping that if I can speed things up blogpost 200 will showcase the finished prototype.  I’ve still got a long way to go but I’ll continue to document the progress here.

Weekend Progress

On Saturday the start of the weekend.  I managed to do 6 hours on my mobile project.  At the end of the 6 hours I had managed to manufacture all of the remaining mobile elements.  I decided not to bother time-lapsing the work on Saturday because there was nothing particularly new in the process.  However, I have time-lapsed the stringing work.

Stringing the Mobile

The stringing process was slow, repetitive and laborious.  It was particularly difficult to push the eyelet hooks into the doweling rods.  At the end of the process my fingers were very sore from constantly gripping the eyelets and constantly pushing down hard on them.  The whole process took approximately 4 – 5 hours. Below is a snapshot of the process in the form of a final time-lapse for this prototype.