Center Pieces

Yes, I know the correct way to spell it is to use all one word, but when you see the various pieces that went into making them, you'll understand.

So, Wife and Other Husband spent multiple days drilling holes into all of the bullets because the original plan was to tie them onto clear fishing line and hang them off the centerpieces like Christmas ornaments.

I ordered all of the vases, the firefly lights, the black sand, and the curly willow and waited for them to arrive.  While waiting, I spray painted the bullets to prepare them to be ornaments.  Then the stuff arrived, I put together a prototype centerpiece, and we saw that our original plan wouldn't work.

The first issue we noted was the battery packs for the firefly lights.  The main issue was that we wouldn't be able to pre-assemble the centerpieces.  The lights looked great and the sand hid the battery pack, but the granules got jammed in the switch to turn the lights on and off and I had to pull out and clean the pack to turn the lights back off.  Then, we found out that we couldn't get it buried back in the sand after we pulled it out.

From there we noted that the battery packs wouldn't lay flat in all of the vases.  We thought that maybe we'd just leave the sand out, but glass blowing is not exact and some of the vases were millimeters smaller inside.  For those, the battery packs had to lay on a diagonal.  So, we had to come up with an alternate idea.  Wife came up with the idea to put moss in.  That works well with the "tree" part of our theme.

The next issue that you may be able to see in the first picture, is that the willow doesn't flex.  It goes more up and down than curving and so the idea to hang bullets off like ornaments wouldn't work either.  So, I had to come up with something else to use the bullets for.  We kept with the Thin Blue Line theme and used them as a base for the vases.

Once I realized the willow wouldn't bend, I decided to prune it down to make the pieces a little shorter.  So, we have the bullet base (lots of hot glue), the vase, the battery pack, the moss, the willow, and then the firefly lights wrapped around it.  All of the pieces.

Five down, four to go!