Tree twisted out of wire with bead chips for leaves.
Here’s a Pretty: Wire-and-Bead Tree

Here’s a Pretty: Wire-and-Bead Tree

For Christmas this year, my daughter requested a wire-and-bead tree, like the ones you can buy in gift shops but, you know, better! I’m no good at defining little projects, and had indeed done similar tree constructions when I was a kid that were definitely at least bigger than the the ones usually on offer. And so I collected supplies, hoping, hoping that the colors I was picking out were the right ones. (I have excellent color taste. And my daughter has excellent color taste. But we do not have the same color taste, so this part is always a bit of a guessing game.)

And then my husband had a brilliant idea! Get the tree started and wrapped onto the base (the part I’d always found hardest to do in the past). But then leave the rest to do together as a joint project. As it turned out, the brilliance of this suggestion had three parts:

  1. A smaller load of crafting to do just before Christmas. Always a plus for me with my super-fun anxiety.
  2. An opportunity to do an art project together with my daughter. My other daughter isn’t as in to art projects as this one, and so we’d fallen out of the habit of trying them together.
  3. My daughter really is a great artist with a keen eye, and the result turned out way nicer than if I would have made it all on my own. I’d used completely different beads in the past, and she figured out how to go all-in with the bead-chips to make it look awesome.

And so behold!

Tree twisted out of wire with bead chips for leaves.
January 2023: Wire-and-bead tree constructed by me and my daughter as a Christmas-gift collaboration project.
close up of wire-and-bead tree base wound around a rock and wooden base.
close up of wire-and-bead tree with turquoise and agate bead-chip leaves.
Close-up of wire-and-bead tree using 3 colors of wire

Admittedly, my photography skills for capturing this aren’t perfect, but trust me, it’s pretty nice! Multi-colored and standing about 6.5″ tall by about 8″ wide.

The wooden base comes from Lowe’s and is meant to be used as the screw-on bottom of a table leg. It fits solidly in the palm of your hand and offers something (the screw) for the base wires of the tree to actually wrap securely around.

The wires are in three colors, partly because the selection at Michael’s when I got the wire was a bit thin and I couldn’t find quite the gauge I wanted in the color I wanted. Turns out, though, that using three colors of wire looks pretty awesome and, happily, the bead chips had large enough holes drilled through them to accept all three gauges. The copper wire was a bit too sturdy, but otherwise nice to work with. The silvery wire was such a tiny gauge that we doubled up some of the wires or else they wanted to droop. The brass was just the right gauge. But freaking brass wire like this is always so springy it was definitely the hardest to work with.

But, my daughter thinks the end result is gorgeous, which means that everything is just exactly perfect!

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