A Glittering Centerpiece

I know I'm focusing a lot on things from my wedding, but that's where most of my entertaining has been centered (lately anyway)!  I originally wanted to make these for all of my tables, but after starting, realized that making 24 of them would be crazy!  But, it would make a great centerpiece for a buffet table.  I used it on my gift table.

By the way, this and most of my other wedding photos were taken by my friend and professional photographer, Josh Benson at JB Photography (he can be reached by email at joshrbenson@gmail.com).

Here's how I did it:
1. I bought a whole bunch of flat, mirror-backed faceted crystals
2. Using a dremel tool with a very small drill bit, I drilled two holes in each crystal, one on each side. (You have to hold the crystal still with a pair of tweezers while drilling - this takes some practice)
 - The drill bit gets hot and starts to melt the plastic of the crystals a little bit, so you periodically have to stop and clean off the bit, and also make sure the holes in the crystals are drilling all the way through.
3. Loop jewelry wire through one of the holes and twist around using jewelry pliers, then loop again through a hole in another crystal and twist back around itself.  (See photo). 

Continue this until you have a long enough string of crystals.  My strings were about 20 crystals long on average, but I made some longer and some shorter.  I made sure I had a few crystals with only one hole in them so that the end of the string wouldn't have an empty hole.  Make however many strings you think looks good.
4. You can hang these strings of crystals from anything.  I used an interesting branch I found.  I thought about spray-painting the branch (You could do silver or any color that matches your theme), but I liked natural better for me.  I hung them by twisting a piece of wire from the hole in the top crystal in the same manner as the connecting wires, but then connected it to the branch.
5. To stand up your masterpiece, you'll need an appropriately sized container.  I found this large vase (about 24" tall) at Michael's. (If you sign up for Michael's weekly email newsletter, you'll get a 40% off coupon every week, comes in very handy!).  I filled my container with sand, but you could also do pebbles or marbles.  You could also do just enough marbles to support the branch, then add water and a fish if you wanted (I've seen that at some weddings).

Now that the wedding is over, I plan to use the strings of crystals to make a lamp, but I haven't gotten that far yet!