Hi! I wanted to share these fairly simple Himmeli candleholders that I made last week that might be just the thing for your Thanksgiving table. What is Himmeli, you ask? It was originally a type of little Finnish Christmas ornament, but lately it has been adapted into all kinds of cool DIYs. I had some mini fishbowls (is that what these are? Some seriously mini fish…) so I decided to spruce them up a bit with a cool “copper” Himmeli pattern.

Earlier this year I made a few Himmeli plant hangers using Mandi from Vintage Revivals tutorial and they turned out looking sooo good.

For the hangers I used brass and copper tubing that I cut down to size, but for this project I took a pretty serious shortcut and used cocktail straws.

Materials:

• Thin wire – you can use string/yarn but I found it was annoyingly difficult to string the straws on the yarn. Plus the wire added a bit of structure
• Cocktail straws
• Mini fish bowl – I think this 6″ glass bubble bowl is what I used
• Copper spray paint

First I cut 25  2 5/8″  lengths of cocktail straw. (I went on to make a second candleholder with 2 3/4″ pieces. You can see what a difference it make in the picture above. I think the absolute best would be something between the two, but I was having trouble getting precise enough lengths.)

I then cut two “wingspans” worth of wire – about 9 feet. To start the Himmeli design, I took 5 pieces of straw and wired them together to form a pentagon at one end of the wire. 

Thanks for your help, Mr. Brass Lobster. My other loyal sidekick, Charlie, was doing a SUPER good job of eating pieces of cocktail straw.

Next, I threaded 4 more pieces onto the wire.

To make another pentagon, I threaded the wire back through the closest side of the adjacent pentagon and the connecting side of the new pentagon. That sentence s basically useless; here is a picture.

Which gave me this

I repeated that step to get another pentagon.
Aaaaand one more. Once I had a row of four pentagons, I added one additional piece of cocktail straw. This became the magical fifth pentagon.

I pulled the wire back through the far side of the first pentagon I made, like so:

And then I added two more straws and threaded the wire in at point A and out at point B which gave me this. I SWEAR this sounds way more complicated than it is.

At this point I put the fishbowl into the basket I made to make sure it would fit. Phew, it did. I added a piece of straw to the wire and started connecting the points, just looping the wire forming the point as I went. 

 

This is what I had once all of the points were connected. 

I did not tie it off here though. Instead I slightly loosened the whole thing, took the bowl out and spray painted the straws copper. It sounded easier than spraying the straws in advance. Once it was dry, I put the bowl back in and tied off the last point.

OK, I am also going to tell you what I did on the second bowl because it is slightly neater, but a little more complicated and if I had pictures this post would be about a million years long. On the second bowl, I connected the first two points, then went through the next two straws before coming out at the next point over and connecting that to the next one. Like this:

Once every other pair of points was connected, I went straight around the rim with the wire and filled in the gaps. And here they are!

Pop a candle in and watch the cool shadows!

Happy Thanksgiving

XO,

Julia