The motivic Mahowald invariant was introduced in [28] and [30] to study periodicity in the C-and R-motivic stable stems. In this paper, we define the motivic Mahowald invariant over any field F of characteristic not two and use it to study periodicity in the F -motivic stable stems. In particular, we construct lifts of some of Adams' classical v 1 -periodic families [1] and identify them as the motivic Mahowald invariants of powers of 2 + ρη.