cheap thrills.

i want to share a project with you that i recently completed and i absolutely love the outcome.

my husband and i live in a pretty generic apartment complex. nothing exciting. i realized after we moved in that some of the people who live in other apartments had done little things to make the outside of their home seem more like it reflected themselves and their family.

one woman had a whole bunch of philodendrons. she had a lovely little green canopy framing her porch. another had a few of those... well, i don't know what you'd call them... they're kinda like windchimes, but with out the chime... i've seen them in craft fairs and flea markets, but have no idea what to call them other than "colorful outdoor hanging thing... you know... like a wind chime, but silent." [i looked for an image, but google didn't return images for this search. crazy, right?]

what i noticed was that the ones i like best had one object repeated over and over, either hanging or framing the porch space.

this reminded me of a technique we used in visual when doing a theme window... suspending a lot of small objects with fishing line. [can i just say, that fishing line is to visual what double-sided tape is to the red carpet? it opens a world of possibilities, and was by far my favorite "tool" in my toolbox.]



michaels had a bunch of plastic bauble beads in the clearance section, and i inspected them to make sure they had a hole to feed fishing line through... and at $.99 a pack, i bought two.

i strung a bunch of baubles on a bunch of lines (there was no science to this... i just played), and then tacked them up over the banister of our porch with thumb tacks. i loved it so much that i went back and made more!


it was SUPER cheap (probably less than $5 including the fishing line... and i still have a TON left over!). and i didn't stress about it... each of the strings is a little different... they're not perfectly evenly spaced... i wanted a little randomization! and because i tacked them up on the overhead beam, they hang in a lovely straight line :)


[pretend you don't see the pool floaty thing there... i do live in arizona, and frequent the pool...]

they form a gentle visual screen between our sliding glass door and the corridor that we live on.

i hung these during monsoon season, and i thought that *surely* they would tangle. but they haven't... not even once.


i'm linking to...