Driftwood to me is such a beautiful organic wood, bleached by the sun and polished smooth by the endless waves. Just seeing it brings back so many memories of childhood summers spent camping along the ocean with my family. We would spend the entire day walking up and down the beach discovering all the ‘goodies’ washed along the shore from the sea. I remember building forts on the beach with my brother out of huge pieces of driftwood, where we would all watch the sunset as a family and take in the salty ocean breeze.
Since I absolutely love driftwood, so I collected a whole truckload of it from the lake we went camping at this summer. The spring runoff flooded the lake, washing all the driftwood onto shore so I was in heaven! And ever since then i’ve been adorning my house with it. I even have driftwood garden labels. It’s not the same as ocean driftwood but I’ll take what I can get. Then a few weeks ago I was unpacking my old wind chime and got a great idea to build a driftwood mobile. Hope you like it!
You will need:
-driftwood in assorted sizes (how many you have will determine the length)
-power drill
-string (I used hemp)
-beads (optional)
Step 1. Drill a hole in the middle of the each piece ofdriftwood. It does not need to be exact so just eye-ball it. I used a piece of wood underneath so I wouldn’t drill through my deck floor hahaha
Step 2. Line up all the driftwood from largest to smallest (you can make it irregular too if you want) with an inch or less of spacing between each piece.
Step 3. Measure a piece of string roughly a foot longer then all your driftwood when it is lined up. Tie a knot at the end of the string and slide on the smallest piece of driftwood first. This will be the bottom. Tie another knot an inch higher than your wood and slide on another piece of wood. Repeat till you get your desired length. It will look like this between the wood.
Step 4. After the last piece of wood I strung on a large bead and fed the string back down through the bead. Tie a knot under the bead and cut off any extra string.
Step 5. I tied another double knot above the bead, added a second bead and tied a final knot. Time to hang it up!
We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came
-John F. Kennedy
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