For this week, we needed to create something in multiples. It needed to be at least five, and have multiple steps.
Almost immediately, the idea of doing a mobile came to my head. I’m a big fan of bees, so I thought doing a mobile like a honeycomb would be pretty cool.
I had a hard time with the materials for this. I bought a long square piece of wood that was too big. Then, I bought acrylic sheet that would damage/curl if cut with the power tools so that didn’t work either. Then, I bought a sheet of plywood online but the overnight delivery was delayed and I wouldn’t have gotten it until Monday–to late! Finally, I ran over to Blick’s and bought two pieces of square plywood. Fourth time’s the charm.
Now that the material issue had been solved, I could finally focus on the project.
I had created a pattern on illustrator to make sure I had the closest shape possible to a honeycomb. I printed it out and glued it to a couple of pieces of cardboard and created my rig for the shapes.
After that, I placed them in my plywood square and used a pencil to trace the outline on the wood, so that cutting would be easier.
Once the outlines were drawn on the wood, I used the scroll saw to cut (close to) perfect hexagons. It was so easy, and so fast! I also got a pleasant surprise with the saw–because of the placement of the hexagons, I ended up getting triangles out of the wood too… double multiples!
After that, I drilled tiny holes at the top of the hexagons so that they could hang and sanded them down to make sure all edges where smooth.
The next step, was paint! As this is inspired by the wonderful bees, I painted the hexagons yellow.
I had also deconstructed a shower loofah as I wanted to press a smaller hexagonal shape on to the hexagons, but unfortunately that didn’t work out for me. I think the mesh was too thin and it just wasn’t giving it the texture I wanted… oh well.
After the hexagons were yellow, and the wooden rods were black (I measured and cut those too), it was time to assemble the mobile. I drilled half-an-inch holes from the edge on the edges and, mistakenly, drilled holes in the middle of all the rods too. After realizing I had to build the mobile form the bottom up, and move the balance point around for it to work, I had to go back and drill all the holes again–bummer.
Once I figured out how to build it though, it was a matter of tying everything together, finding balance points and putting it together (all in all, there were around 8 steps in order to create this). Voila! my mobile is complete. The bees would be proud.
Great work. Perhaps you could laser etch the honeycomb pattern in the hexagon to get the texture you want. I’m glad you tried the scroll saw, looks like it worked out very well for you.