A Fish Extender for a Disney Cruise with a Moana theme

On our Disney cruise later this year, for the first time I've signed up to take part in a Fish Extender gift exchange. This is a fun organised exchange of small gifts that takes place on a Disney cruise, and is usually organised through the Facebook group for your sailing. We'll be placed in a group with a number of other families and will exchange gifts with them, either one gift for the cabin or individual gifts per person. I won't get my final group details for a few months yet so it's too early for me to be thinking about what gifts to give, so I decided to concentrate on making the actual Fish Extender which will hang outside our stateroom door.

I didn't feel up to making my Fish Extender from scratch, so I purchased this Four pocket hanging organiser (affiliate link) from Amazon to decorate. After consultation with the children we decided to go with a Moana theme, and this is what I came up with!

Fish Extender made from Amazon organiser and felt

For each of the four pockets I made a felt front piece. My concept is that Mia's pocket is under the sea, and Harry's pocket represents the waves on the surface of the sea. My pocket is the beach, and Ram's pocket is the sky. Each pocket has a line from the song embroidered on it - "See the line, where the sky, meets the sea, it calls me". To embroider the text I traced it from my computer screen onto tissue paper, sewed over the paper on the felt, then removed the tissue paper to leave the embroidery. It's a bit wobbly, but I think that it works! All the other pieces are cut from felt and stitched in place.

Felt Fish Extender name labels in progress

Here are the four completed panels. I also used some beads for the coral on Mia and a couple of felt stickers. I used spray adhesive to stick the panels to the organiser, with a little bit of fabric glue down the edges to make sure it was all firmly in place.

Moana themed name labels for Fish Extender

It turned out quite a bit larger than I was expecting, but I've checked the measurements and it should still fit. I've used Halloween ribbon to hang it as we are going on a Halloween on the High Seas cruise, and I'm also going to add a few Halloween embellishments to it before we go. I have some Halloween tinsel that I can tack around the edge, and some large pumpkin stickers.

I had a lot of fun making it!