Himmeli Candleholders

Julia Fabens
by Julia Fabens
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. 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. The catch? Forget tubing and use 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 is 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:
Pop a candle in and watch the cool shadows!


Happy Thanksgiving


XO,


Julia
Julia Fabens
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
Go
Frequently asked questions
Have a question about this project?
  1 question
Comments
Join the conversation
2 of 18 comments
  • MyDecor8Craft MyDecor8Craft on May 09, 2017

    This is absolutely stunning! You made the simple clear glass bowl into an amazing piece. Thanks for sharing such a great idea. Loved it!

  • Glenda Glenda on Nov 18, 2019

    I am impressed! So neat and so attractive. I plan to try this - hope I can do as well as your did..

Next