The staff of Glamour Coffee Shop made the sparkle balls that decorate their streetside cafe, which is quite a scene. They say the sparkle balls aren’t just pretty, they also attract customers. You can see that’s true by the number of Glamour sparkleball photos on social media. Tìm kiếm tốt, @glamourcoffeeshop :)
Number 36 of the New York Times top 52 destinations of the year is Tyrol, Austria, home of Kristallwelten, a winter funland developed by Swarovski Crystal. Watching the NYT video of Kristallwelten’s Crystal Cloud (an art installation of 800,000 hand-mounted crystals) I was reminded of Lighted Christmas Balls, much humbler sparkle clouds made of chicken wire and mini-lights. We humans seem to have an innate attraction for things that sparkle. Stars, moon glow on water, diamonds. To capture that feeling of wonder, some of us just can’t help ourselves and build our own sparkly light balls out of wire mesh or plastic cups :)
Crystal’s “striped” sparkleball which got me thinking.
When Crystal B sent a photo of her striped sparkleball, I emailed back to ask how she’d “made the stripes.” I felt pretty foolish when she said she’d just used two colors of cups. It took a while for me to realize that how the sparkleball hangs determines how we see it.
To show off the horizontal rows so you see stripes, you’ll need to put the plug in the “top” of the sparkleball half. When you insert the last 4 cups, do it in pairs and leave a gap between them. Put the plug through the gap and thread the lights starting in the middle of the half. (video below)
If your plug comes out the middle, the rows will run sort of vertical/diagonal.