HOW TO CREATE GRAPEVINE LIGHTING BALLS
I wish I could dream up a better NAME
Other than
BALLS.
I can create them, hang them, make them look pretty with lights, but I haven’t dreamt up a REAL name for them yet. I am stumped. I need a name that doesn’t make me *smirk*. Any ideas? So far, all I have come up with is balls.
Uhm. Never mind.
I can travel my way across land and sea. I can perch myself in a vineyard and look calm.
{That is because I went to the wine tasting BEFORE this photo}
Tricked you, didn’t I?
Back to the balls…
Now that I have put your head in the gutter, get it out. And concentrate. I have a really cool DIY to show you. Don’t judge this lonely ball, all by itself. This is just to give you a drift of what is ahead. I need to get you all revved up for this DIY. I know you would rather sit in your jammies and just sip your coffee. I know how you roll.
These little crazed balls may not look like much as you create them, but they are stunners when they are lit at night. They also look FAB in the garden. They are organic in nature, so they can definitely take some abuse. Wind, rain, snow….no probs. Grapevine is built to weather the storm. Strong and sturdy wins the race. No, that is slow and steady wins the race. Whateve. I didn’t tell you I was smart. I can’t even name these little …….”whatevers” AKA balls.
WHAT YOU NEED :
Grapevine . Duh. I told you this was easy. Need help finding grapevine? If you are Canadian, it is everywhere. Like. Everywhere. It is like a wild weed. If you are not Canadian, don’t fret. Grapevine is abundant. Here is what it looks like :
That’s right. It is presently taking over my barn. Grapevine rolls like that. Bad ass. It’s a WILD thaang. If you stood still long enough, it would probably grab you and grow around you like a tree. It is easily found on fence rows, growing up trees, taking over gardens at a home near you. It’s like an invasion of the body snatchers. If you plant a wee stem of it one year, you will have a grapevine house the next year. I had so much of it, I made a grapevine TREE for under our treehouse. Because the tree-house didn’t have enough trees around it already. What? Don’t ask. I had an abundance of grapevine and it needed to go to a good home. Don’t judge me. I am only a designer. My skills are limited to wine drinking and grapevine wrestling. Funny how those two skills go so well together. I should just peel the grapes off of the vine, jump on them, and make wine like Lucille Ball.
Treehouse Grapevine tree
If you are not near grapevine, don’t give up. I can save your butt ONE MORE TIME with this alternative. Yes, I have a plan B.
You can make
WIRE BALLS
Yup. Genius name, isn’t it? Wire Balls. You can make these to use for lighting. Or for decor. Easy to do. I pinkie swear it. They look drop dead amazing on tabletops, in the garden, or even IN the house. The list is unbelievably endless. No time for that now. More on that later *
SUPPLIES :
1. Grapevine
2. Wire to cut into small pre-cut pieces. I usually cut about 30 pre-cut pieces. This wire will be used to secure the grapevine together as you are wrapping the beach ball.
Pick a gauge like what you see in the photographs below. I didn’t pay attention to what number it was. There are no rules. We are here for good times, kids.
3. Wire cutters
4. Beach balls ( a few varying sizes )
Buy varying sizes of balls (there I go with that ball word again). Immature. I am. Make sure you buy the kind of beach balls that you can deflate. The variety of sizes means that you will have a variety of finished sizes of grapevine balls.
Why buy a deflatable beach ball ?
a) you can play with it later
b) If you can’t deflate the ball, you will need to beat the heck out of it, to remove it from your grapevine. Trust me on this one. Buy a deflatable ball. No need to murder a beach ball. No balls need to die in this experiment.
5. Twinkle lights.
You know the kind. Little wee white lights, with a GREEN wire. One box of 50 white mini lights is a good amount to use per ball. Don’t buy the ones with the white rope/wire. Those will look stupid. Mmm. I retract that statement. If you spray paint your grapevine balls white that could be super funky. I might need to try white version 101 next. White grapevine balls with white mini lights. I LOVE WHITE I have a problem.
Enough about my problems.
Let’s get crackin’ on those balls.
*snicker*
6. Chain, twine, rope &/or extension cord to hang the balls from the trees. You will not need this chain or rope if you are placing the grapevine balls in the garden. Ambiance. Less Work. Awesome.
HOW TO CREATE GRAPEVINE LIGHTING BALLS
1. Gather up your grapevine, strip it of the grapes and leaves. Make your grapevine buck-naked. This is not a glamorous job even though the buck-naked part might sound glamorous. Wear gloves. Do not get a manicure the day before. Been there. Done that. It was dumb.
Grapevine looks like this :
This is like reality TV. Not a glam shot. But a 'reality' shot.
Pick the grapevine when it is still growing, soft, and pliable. If you pick it, and let it dry out, it will crack and be too dried out to really work with it. It can be done, but only if you want to do things the hard way. I like the easy route – myself.
DETAIL SHOT OF GRAPEVINE :
Grapevine is easy to get, since most farmers and other country folk just love to get rid of it. Unless you are in wine country. Which I am not. And I wouldn’t suggest stealing grapevine from a vineyard. That would kinda get you into some hot water. Just sip their wine and leave their grapevine alone. Good clean fun.
So in my neck of the woods, and for most people, grapevine does cause harm since it chokes out trees and takes over. It tries to rule the roost in mother nature. Don’t let it. Pull it off, wrangle it, and it is yours to turn into a light.
Our barn is under 'grapevine siege'. Just sayin'.
2. After you have stripped the grapevine, you are left with the stem {the brown woody part that you see in this picture}. Begin to wrap it around a beach ball. Remember, you need to deflate this beach ball when you are done, so be sure to get a deflatable ball. I usually deflate the ball after the grapevine ball starts to take shape. Don’t try and sneak the beach ball out after you have made a FULL GRAPEVINE BALL. You will definitely need to murder the beach ball if you wait that long. Pull out the beach ball while you still have ROOM to pull it out.
3. Have your wire and wire cutters handy. I prep a bunch of pre-cut wire, so I am not wrangling with the wire cutters, wire, ball, and grapevine all at once. I am not that coordinated.
Pre nipped wire :
Did you notice that I can grow a mini tree out of my tabletop, but I still can’t grow grass in my yard. Seriously. What the what what ?
NOTE : I usually work with different sizes of balls (there I go again). Now I want to tell myself to shut up. The different sizes of beach balls will give you different sizes of lighting.
A wee sidebar note: At this point you are probably wondering why I have a table built of stones and old boards. It too was a great DIY project. I left my Mom and her best friend alone outside my barn one day. Not alone actually. With wine. No joke.
Hours passed. A whole lotta laughing went on. I think one of them pee’d their pants. The other one went on a disappearing act for a while and created a grapevine angel using an old staircase post. I swear. I could not make this stuff up.
And then..
And then…
there was a TABLE.
They made a table, with rocks, stones, boulders….anything they could find…The ‘legs’ of the table were made from the rocks. The table top is made from barn boards. They, no doubt, probably ripped those boards right off my barn walls.
I was pretty impressed with the whole DIY stone table. I seriously contemplated leaving those two ladies alone with wine – MORE OFTEN.
If you look carefully in the picture, you will see that it has a big metal bit stuck in there {NOW}
A friend of ours drove over ( Yes, OVER ) the table with his snowmobile one day.
I swear, it happened. Well, I did swear, to tell you the truth. The table was buried under a mountain of snow. He didn’t see A TABLE. Crazy. Well, I suppose I couldn’t blame him. How often does one have a stone table beside a wood shed, made of barn boards, and a whole lotta wine ?
He fixed the table with that metal thingy that he found from Gawd-knows-where in the forest beside our house. It is probably someones metal hip when they were buried here from the local murder. Ok, now I am just making up stories.
On to those danged balls again….That is enough fun stories for you. You have to get to work on this DIY.
4. As you wrap the beach ball with the grapevine, secure it with your pre cut wire to ensure a solid hold. It will seem tricky at first, sort of like rolling a mammoth ball of out of control wool. Once the ball gets going though, it gets easier.
Check out the glam working gloves. HAWT.
5. After the grapevine ball starts to take shape, you can now deflate your beach ball, and continue working on building up more grapevine. Just keep adding the grapevine, in circles around the ball, like you are rolling a ball of wool. A big ball of wool. Something that the green giant would use to knit a sweater.
Don’t sweat it too much if you don’t get all the grapes and leaves off the ball. They will eventually dry up and fall off. Like a baby belly button. Except that was a gross analogy.
6. When you are finished , you need to stand back and admire it.
Wild Thaang
It likes to be admired. It is not at all camera shy.
At this point, I think I went and celebrated …
And wondered why the heck grapevine looks like this in France :
And looks like this in my garden :
After all that celebrating, I forgot to take photos of what it looks like to string the twinkle lights on it. It is not rocket science. I know you can do it. Just string lights FIRST, drink wine AFTER.
7. Wrap the mini lights around the balls. You can be quite random. There aren’t any twinkle lighting police, the last time I checked. No rules here.
8. You can now add a chain to hang your balls. I haven’t always thought ahead on this one. I scramble around the house and barn and look for chain. I sometimes try to steal it from the kids bikes. Or my husbands workshop. Failing that, I have used the extension cord itself to hang the balls too. That is probably not technically correct, but I am so excited to hang them, I don’t care.
9. I attach electrical tape to secure the mini light plug to the extension cord and keep it free of rain and creepy critters. And to keep Granny from getting electrocuted when she touches the balls to admire them.
10. If I feel fanciful and grow a wild hair, I use big ol’ rope or funky twine. Interesting rope is a nice twist if you are feeling artistically twisted. You could even braid something if you felt all ambitious. Or braid your hair. I don’t care. Hang that ball.
WORST CASE SCENARIO :
*{Here is your PLAN B}
You have no grapevine. You have no mini lights. You have a lot of wine. You have a bit of time. You have WIRE. You can still make these :
Same deal. Start with a beach ball. Minus the grapevine. Minus the …just about everything but wire. Just wrap with wire around the beach ball, and secure with your pre-cut pieces of wire. Use a thin wire, and wrap little ‘knots’ to make it all hold together. I used old fencing wire to create this one. Left it out in the rain to rust, because I like rust. I do. I do.
Sip your wine.
Admire your balls.
Done.
