Glow Willow from Below

A potted-leafless-branching tree, glows in a diffused-gold-bulbing undergrowth.

Leafless & lifeless branching trees have this ghostly beauty about themselves. The dendritic patterns & shadows create enchanting designs. I’ve always been spookily & creatively drawn to them, as I realize that these naked branches used just the way it is, can create quite a unique design experience.

The first task was to find the branch itself – which had just the right branching, just the right height and just the right strength. Boy! With an intense search of 13 days, 13 hours and 13 minutes – we finally found the perfect kind we needed.

Post getting the branch, we nicely cleaned it up - removed the years of dirt that settled on it. After the cleaning and drying, we touched it up with strokes of metallic gold paint. We painted it up to give our décor piece a more rich & suitable for home feel.

Once the branch was ready, we erected it in a simple cylindrical pot. The idea is to keep the pot as simple as possible, so that the natural beauty of the naked branch is not clashed with.

Our idea was to fill the pot brim with sprouting bulbs, so that the diffused light from below would subtly cast a golden-glow on the tree. In order to do that we firstly created a connection of the required 10 bulbs in parallel wiring (finally my class X physics come to use). The parallel connections seems at first difficult, but the idea is to just be sure that the same colored live wires are all connected together and the other colored neutral ones together, and all finally end in 2 terminal sources. Quite a few online tutorials are available to help better understand.

Post that we interspersed and injected these bulbs in a thick thermacol sheet. Being careful of the wiring always! The crate of thermacol & bulbs was then put around the branched tree. Since the wires are still visible, we put in small stones all over the pot and around the bulbs.

To finally reveal our masterpiece, just plug in and switch on the lights. Get aback… and absorb the beautiful-rich-soft-golden-glow of the haunted-leafless-branched-tree!

It is guaranteed to get you goose-bumps!

Always be careful when connecting multiple wires together. Be sure the the live and neutral wires never come in contact. Also wire-joints should be well connected and insulated. A quick and easy way is to twine the two ends of the wire and then add a drop of hot glue off the glue gun. Let it cool and dry. This will not only create a permanent joint but also create the required insulation.