DVD Mobile

Last year for Christmas, I converted all of our family's home movies to DVD.  Twenty-something years worth of home movies translated into 50 DVDs, and I made a set for my parents, myself, and each of my 3 siblings, which totaled 250 discs.  (If you want to do this, buy a little device on Amazon called easyCAP.  It is dirt cheap, around $8, but you will have to read the reviews in order to learn how to use it because the instructions that come with it are worthless.  You will notice that more than half of the reviews are horrible; those reviews are from the people who did not read the other reviews and thus could not work it.  Read the good reviews from the computer gurus, it will be well-worth your time.  Once you figure it out, it is super easy to use!  One review said it did not work on Windows 7 64-bit, but that is what I have and it worked swell!  You do need a lot of space on your hard drive for the capturing, it uses about 1 GB/minute of video for the capturing, but once you save it as a movie through Windows Movie Maker, it will only be 3-4 GB, and then you can delete the raw footage.)

If you have ever burned a DVD, you know that errors sometimes occur and render the DVD unplayable.  If you are making 250 DVDs, you end up with a whole lot of unusable discs.  I have a hard time throwing away something if I think I can come up with a use for it.  We all have plenty of coasters made out of nonworking discs, and I have quite a collection of coasters as it is, so I needed something different.  The internet was not much help.  Yes, if you google it, you will find all sorts of creative and elaborate uses for old discs, but none of these ideas appealed to me, except there were many mobiles pictured.  None of the mobiles were my style, but nevertheless I decided to brainstorm a mobile that would be my style!

The result is my baby mobile.  I decorated the discs in various ways, and had my friends decorate a few, too.  High-contrast is very stimulating to babies, so several of the discs are painted black & white or maroon & white (we have to begin instilling the Aggie spirit at an early age!).  I glued squares of black & white fabrics on some of the discs.  Babies are also stimulated by bright colors, and my nursery's theme is "music & musicals," so some of the discs are painted with music notes in bright colors.  The reflections of light off of the discs is also stimulating so the backs are left blank, and I have a few discs that I glued together so that the shiny sides are facing out, and I added ribbon to these.

The next step is to drill a hole near the edge of each disc for hanging.  I used cotton crochet thread to tie the discs to a hanger (for lack of anything better to use and for the purpose of being economical).  I then tied the hanger at three points so that it could be hung from a hook on the ceiling.  I have it hanging over my changing table, and, in my opinion, it looks spectacular.  When the fan is on, the air turns the discs and creates a nice effect.  I have additional discs that I am going to use on a play gym that I got secondhand and all the toys are missing.  They will be too high to touch but stimulating to look at and reach for.  I am sure I will come up with more uses before all is said and done.