Being pregnant during the year of Coronavirus is a strange time and I suddenly found myself with so much time on my hands as work – let’s be honest, it’s lean times for a freelancer when the hardest-hit industry is hospitality and tourism. So, with all this new found time, I decided to make this DIY black and white mobile for the baby
DIY Black And White Visuals

Babies are still developing their eyesight when they are born and can only see close up and black and white patterns contrast helps them build their visual muscles before moving on to bold colours and shapes.
- Visual Stimulation: Babies are drawn to high contrast patterns and this close line of vision in black and white helps their visual development. I also did not make the mistake of making the patterns vertical as we have to make and design everything from the baby’s line of vision.
- Focus and Attention: Babies have a limited attention span, so we want to keep things simple. Hence black and white and very simple visual patterns that helps narrow down the visual noise and helps them to focus, before graduating to vibrant colours and shape recognition.
- Brain Development: Studies have shown that exposure to black and white visuals supports the visual cortex in the brain. High contrast and clear shapes are said to help babies’ brains process and make sense of visual information in the first 0-3 months.
- Visual Tracking: Babies’ slowly learn to track objects with their eyes over time. The black and white, repetitive shapes and patterns are said to encourage eye tracking.
- Early Learning: We are a Montessori practising family and black and white visuals are a way to introduce early learning concepts. From picture books to flash cards, this early visual exploration is said to help promote cognitive development.
The Montessori mobile set is also quite pricey and if you had some spare time on your hands, it’s definitely fun to get crafty and DIY one. It definitely also carries so much more meaning.

In order to deal with ennui, anxiety and to continue to feel productive, I’ve been sewing and crafting, using the gift of time to make things for the Baby G – upcycling is economical and fun. This was a really fun DIY project.

Time is invaluable and I sought out to make the best of having this luxury of time to create, pouring myself into creating a little welcome gift for my future offspring and also winning with savings.
I largely followed these instructions on Peekaboo Patterns to make these high contrast black and white felt mobiles, but couldn’t find an embroidery hoop to make the mobile from scratch so I upcycled an old one I bought on Carousell from 5€ and made the rest. Cut off the pompoms and customised it.

I wasn’t sure how to attach them in a balanced manner that the weight distribution would hold, so I sewed the little cushions with snap buttons, which makes them transferable to a play gym if I wanted to change things around a bit.
Something interesting I read was that not all mobiles are designed from the perspective of the baby. While it looks all cute and fancy with animals and whatnot, oftentimes from the baby’s perspective it just looks like a spec of colour.
A glue gun is considered safe, so instead of sewing the shapes together which requires meticulous and probably intermediate sewing machine skills (I’m just a novice), I glued the shapes and finished up the cushion with a simple stitch on the sewing machine after stuffing it.
The project took me about two hours from cutting the fabric and putting everything together.
I hope Baby G likes what I’ve put together and will have fun with them.