DIY Rustic Wood Slice Birthday Calendar Mobile

I made these lovely wood slice calendar mobiles as Christmas gifts one year. I made three – one for our home, and two sets for grandparents. I love how they turned out! So rustic and natural, and yet so personal at the same time. I know they’ll be treasured for years to come.

I used (affiliate links):

• birch wood slices – I bought mine handcut from Rachael’s Scraps on Etsy. (Or it looks like there are similar ones on Amazon.)
• 12mm x 5mm metal hoop screw eye pins – I bought mine from DIYBeads888 on Etsy. (Or here are similar ones on Amazon.)
• Metallic gold Sharpie permanent marker
• Kitchen twine
• Large sticks from our backyard

This craft looks simple enough, but there are actually a few tricks.

1. Before you start, work out how many wood slices you think you’ll need, and then double it. This will cover you in case you make mistakes writing on the names, plus you’ll want extras so you can add new babies and new friends to the calendar in years to come!)
2. Make sure you choose wood that is soft enough to be able to screw in the screw eye pins. The birch wood slices were perfect for this. The large local sticks were trickier, but with trial and error, I found three that were of soft enough wood to work. (I had planned to use some beautiful fallen gum branches, but I had to discard that idea because that wood was just too hard.)
3. Before starting, I widened the gap in the eyelet of half of the metal eye pins, by sliding a butter knife into the small gap and levering it open, so that they looked more like hooks than hoops.
4. I screwed in two metal eye pins to each of the wood slices – the ‘hook’ ones on top and the ‘hoop’ ones on the bottom.
5. I also screwed in 12 hoop eye pins, evenly spaced, along a long rustic stick or branch.
6. Then I wrote family and friends (and pets!) names and their birthday day on each slice. Gold marker look more dark brown than gold on the wood slice, and it looks much better than black.
7. I hung the wood slices according to each person’s birth month, in descending date order. (To add another person to the calendar, simply create a new wood slice for them, and then insert in the correct spot.)
8. I tied some kitchen twine to each end of the branch, creating an easy way to hang it on the wall.

If you’re giving this as a gift, it’s a good idea to have extra wood slices (with the hook and hoop screws pre-screwed in) and the gold Sharpie on hand, because you can be sure the person receiving it will have extra friends and family that they want to add, even if you’ve tried really hard to remember everyone!

We also chose to include special family members who are deceased to ours, marking those wood slices with a tiny cross. I feel like it’s a nice way to keep those special people in our thoughts and hearts. xxx

xx Danya