DIY Geometric Shapes

hollygrace13

10 years ago

Would you believe me if I told you that I made these geometric decor shapes from drinking straws? You don’t have to believe me because I am going to show you!!

This was such a fun little project and now I am left with some stunning decor. I saw these succulent holders on Pinterest the other day and I wanted to make something similar.image source: Lia Griffith

The only problem I was facing was the copper piping. It can be a little on the pricey side, so I racked my brain to think of an alternative, and that is when I remembered that I had an over whelming amount of drinking straws. You see, this summer, I made a whole bunch of these pencil holders for teacher’s gifts. They are actually drinking straw holders, but I replaced the straws with pencils. Super cute, right?

I hung onto the drinking straws because I knew that I would be able to DIY them into something and today was the day I put them to good use!

I have also been looking for a project to use this new paint that I got — Americana Decor Metallics in Copper by DecoArt. This paint is great to transform ordinary stuff into a beautiful copper and unless you actually touch the drinking straws you would never know that they are not copper piping. This paint is bang on!

To do this project, I used my drinking straws and some crafting wire.

I whipped out my paint brush and started painting as many straws as I could. I had to do two coats of the paint on the straws. Once the paint was dried, I cut off the ends of the straw that weren’t painted. I didn’t paint all the way down to the end just so I could have something to hang onto while I was painting.

Then it was time to start building some shapes. This process was a little bit of trial and error.

I started by sliding the wire through the a single straw.Then, I bent the wire up. I felt that I didn’t have enough wire on the left side so I twisted on another piece of wire. It would be a lot easier if I had wire that was on a spool, but I make what I have work.

I slide two more straws on the wire and then formed them into a triangleI slide the extra bit of wire into the straw to hide it.

I kept adding more wire and more straw and then started connecting them. There really is no rhyme or reason to how I did this. I just started connecting them.

The wire started getting a little flimsy, so I secured the areas where the three straws meet up with a bit of hot glue. You have to be really careful when you are doing this cause the glue is hot and can melt the plastic and the wire. What I did, was I added a dab of the hot glue and immediately blew on it to cool it down. This seemed to work quite well.