Star Stick Mobile For A Pop Of Colour Outside

Hooray, hooray! The warm weather has finally arrived, and we’re spending our days exploring and creating outdoors again.

One of the things I love best about crafting with the hooligans at this time of year is that we can get creative with natural materials that we find in our yard and garden, and on our walks around the neighbourhood.

Sticks are one of our favourite natural materials to craft with.

Remember our homemade rainbow stick wind chimes? They hung from a branch of the oak tree right beside our playhouse for years. They had held up beautifully for many seasons, but they’d started showing their age this spring.

We’ve been missing the splash of colour that they added to that little corner of the yard, so we set out on a stick hunt the other day, with a plan to make another whimsical ornament to hang in their place.

In no time, we’d gathered a bagful of twigs and sticks and we returned home to brainstorm ideas. We came up with this star stick mobile. It was fun and easy to make, a great fine-motor workout for the kids and it looks beautiful hanging in our tree.

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To make our star stick mobile we used:

• sticks
• snippers
• colourful yarn
• hot glue gun

To start, the girls piled all of their sticks and twigs together, and then went thorough the process of selecting the straightest sticks.

Then we sorted those into piles of five (five sticks for each star), grouping together sticks that were similar in diameter.

Then I trimmed each set of five sticks to be the same length. I varied the length of each set so each star would be a different size.

Next, the girls formed stars out of their sticks, and I glued them together with a hot glue gun. Using a hot glue gun rather than a low-heat glue gun is best for this project as the low-heat glue may not be strong enough to hold the sticks together.

The next part of the project is a lot of fun and a great challenge for fine-motor skills and co-ordination.

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To begin, the kids knotted their yarn to their stars, and then they wrapped and wound a long length of yarn around and around the star. Each time they switched from one point of the star to another, they had to focus on coming back across the body of the star. If you don’t, and you take your yarn from point to point, you’ll lose the star shape and end up with something that looks more like a spider’s web.

They finished with another knot to secure everything.

When the stars were finished, we had to think of a way to turn them into a mobile. We decided to make one big, horizontal star to hang all of our yarn-wrapped stars from.

We attached our stars by winding a very long length of yarn around and around the top star and dropping it down to the smaller stars below.

To hang our mobile, I looped one last length of yarn through the top star.

We’re so happy to have a cheery pop of colour brightening our outdoor play space again.