This past weekend I attended a baby shower for a friend – the first baby shower I’ve ever been to! My friend is having a boy who is due in April. Being a knitter/crocheter, I obviously wanted to make something instead of buying something from the registry. However, I’ve never loved the idea of spending hours making a sweater that will be too small in a few months. So… a baby blanket? That’s sensible, but I think I’d want to make a sensible one that could be washed after inevitably being thrown up on, and I felt like making something pretty and fun, not sensible.
So I decided to make a mobile! I’ve done a little amigurumi type crochet in the past, and my boyfriend got excited about helping me assemble and hang everything. I decided to do a solar system: I’m a scientist, spheres are easy to crochet, and the whole thing can be colorful and detailed and cute but still classy.
I used this free ideal sphere pattern available on Ravelry to make different sizes of spheres. I added a flat round ring to Saturn and ruffles of solar plumes to the sun.
I love how it turned out! It looks handmade but not too frumpy or clunky. I assembled the mobile with white cotton yarn, super glue, and wooden craft sticks from Michaels. The yarn is various colors of sock yarn I had lying around. I used a 2 mm crochet hook so that the fabric would be really tight. I like to save yarn ends in a big jar and use them for stuffing amigurumi – this project used up quite a large chunk of my ends!
If you have any questions about the actual yarn, colors, or sphere sizes I used for specific planets, I’d be happy to answer! I’m thinking about making another mobile for another baby in my life – any ideas on a theme for my next mobile?
knot and knit 
This is so wonderful–the best baby shower present I have ever seen! And reading it made me cry, in a good way. You give so much of yourself to presents!
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That looks fantastic! I’m new to crochet – how do you you make a flat ring and how do you add ruffles?
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I sort of improvised! For the flat ring, I just single crocheted into the front of the stitches around the middle of the planet. On the next row, I did some increases (by doing 2 single crochets into one stitch), I think about once every 6 stitches. I think I did one more row with the increases. For the ruffles, I did pretty much the same thing in that I single crocheted into the front of stitches, but I didn’t go all the way around, and, on the next row, I did increases every stitch.
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Also, I’m sure I tried a few different things until I figured out what looked the best. That’s one of the things I like about smaller projects like this – it doesn’t feel like a big deal to rip out and try again because it wasn’t that many stitches and didn’t take that much time!
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