How I made the antler mobile...

It all started when I asked my mother in law to bring us some antlers.  I was thinking like...a pair of antlers.  I was going to mount them over the archway in our living room.   

Well she sent over a box full of antlers...(these are just the few that were left over)... 

None of the antlers had mountings so I decided not to hang them over the archway, because it would take quite a lot of rigging to get them to hang straight.

I started brainstorming another way to incorporate them into the room.  

It always bothered me how the screen behind this chair really leads the eye up to.....nothing.

I started arranging them in different ways until I came up with the idea to make a mobile, a perfect solution to go over the chair in our living room.

I started tieing the antlers together with twine.  I tied two smaller sets of antlers together first, then two larger sets, the stacked the larger sets over the smaller ones and tied them all together.

 But this wasn't really stablizing the antlers to stay in "formation".  

I remembered some extra burlap I had and cut a strip of that.  (Burlap comes in so handy for so many different projects!)

First Chris tied some big twine rope around the antlers for me.  I can't tell you what type of knot he did...just call your local boyscout.  Then I tied the strip of burlap around that.  I tied it like you would the ribbon on a present (making a cross at the bottom), then tucked in the loose ends at the top.   

Then the tricky part came along...hanging it.

First I tried just a regular screw hook.  It immediately pulled right out of the sheet rock.  The antlers are much too heavy for that.  So Chris went to Lowe's and investigated and bought this screw that has some sort of built in anchoring system.  Chris tied another some sort of cowboy knot for the screw to hook through.  

The hook is quite shiny and white, so I've been meaning to go back and paint it the flat ceiling color.  It's too bad we couldn't use a cooler, more rustic hook...but I'm not too crazy about the idea of our ceiling caving in...or the antler mobile crashing down on someone's head!  

So here's how it turned out...

Thanks for reading!