Vanilla Vases

Originally published at Design Mom back in January for a guest post, here's my contribution to the world of floral arranging, I'm posting early today so we can take off on the next leg of our trip. . . .

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I love baking with real vanilla beans, they taste like nothing else--there is no substitute. And nearly as wonderful as the beans themselves are the beautiful little glass tubes the beans come in.

For a couple years I saved the tubes because I was sure I'd find something really perfect to do with them and wouldn't you know it--this was the year my creativity finally paid off.

I bought some eight gauge solid copper wire from a local hardware store (I got it for sixty-two cents a foot) and curled it in free-form shapes that clutch the tubes and make standing vases.

To make your own here are a couple tips:

1. Use pliers as little as possible to bend because not only will they nick the wire (even when you protect it with a couple layers of felt) they tend to make bends that aren't as smooth as those you can do with only your fingers.

2. Bend the wire as little as possible--don't unbend and rebend it--because the molecular properties of copper make it so that the more the metal moves the more rigid and difficult to bend it becomes.

3. To get the nice little spirals that hold the vials in place I gently bent the wire into a somewhat tight spiral then stretched it apart. The technique worked well and kept the tubes clutched tightly in place.

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Congratulations to Julie of Elk Grove Village, Illinois for winning this Saturday's Giveaway from Julie Smith Accessories and and Designing Diva--wonderful spring prizes for a lovely spring wardrobe.

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Don't forget to enter this month's Write-Away Contest--the topic is "The Next Twenty Years" and the deadline is the 19th.

Technorati tags: vases, flowers