Melanie Sabol – Copy Editor
With finals happening right as we speak, it can be quickly forgotten that the holidays are upon us. Don’t lose any of the holiday spirit by being cooped up in your room with no decorations. It’s hard to decorate a dorm room (believe me) but you can make it work. Here is a fun way to put up a Christmas tree in your dorm room that requires no lights!
Christmas Tree Ornament Mobile
Here’s what you’ll need:
17″ steamer rack from a restaurant supply store
About five feet of lightweight jack chain
A small carabiner
100 basic ornament hooks
One roll, 500 feet, monofilament jewelry string (not the stretchy sort)
200 jewelry crimp beads or tubes
Jewelry crimping tool
100 lanyard hooks
100 ornaments
Suspending the ornaments:
I used jewelry monofilament secured with crimp tubes to hold the ornaments. I simply created loops at both ends. I made a bunch of different lengths (details on that below). I secured each line to points in the rack grid using lanyard hooks, and hung a basic wire ornament hook at the bottom ends. The lanyard hooks at the top are strong enough to hold heavier ornaments, and because they close they won’t fall off if the mobile is bumped. The basic ornament hooks allow one to easily move ornaments around from one spot to another. My tip to you: keep the lines as separate as possible while you’re working with them. I spent more time untangling clear threads than doing anything else on this project. It was maddening. After I discovered just how maddening I started hanging them in groups by length from a curtain rod and weighing them down with an ornament to keep them separated, doing this made the hanging of the ornaments go quickly.
Figuring out where to put the hanging points on the rack involved a bit of math, most all of which I abandoned. I’ll do my best to describe what I did.
I decided to create rings on the rack, with the longer threads hanging on the outside rings to create the cone tree shape. Actually it creates tiers, think a tall skinny wedding cake. I figured that my ornaments were usually about two or three inches in diameter so I needed to space the rings a little more than 1 inch apart so that the ornaments would have room to hang without being crowded by the longer threads around them. I spaced the rings about 1.5 inches apart.
I determined I wanted my tree to be about four feet in total height from the top ornament to the bottom. I made the first ornament, the center point, hang 3.5 inches, and added length from there. For my needs, each set of string needed to be 1.75 inches longer than the last. Each ring on the hanging rack held for different lengths of string. I added two inches to the length of string I actually cut to allow for the loops.
To figure out how many ornaments per ring, I completely made it up. I decided the first ring should hold seven ornaments and went up by four from there. So the number of ornaments went: one, seven, 11, 15, 19, 23, 27. I divided the four lengths of string between those, giving the longest length more ornaments to help the triangle effect. Whew. So I cut this many at these lengths for these rings:
For the Center Point: 5.5″
For Ring 1: one at 7.25″, one at 9.0″, two at 10.75″, three at 12.5″
For Ring 2: two at 14.25″, two at 16.0″, three at 17.75″, four at 19.5″
For Ring 3: three at 21.25″, three at 23.0″, four at 24.75″, five at 26.5″
For Ring 4: four at 28.25″, four at 30.0″, five at 31.75″, six at 33.5″
For Ring 5: five at 35.25″, five at 37.0″, six at 38.75″, seven at 40.5″
For Ring 6: six at 42.25″, six at 44.0″, seven at 45.75″, eight at 47.5″
In order to make the measuring for cutting go as quickly as possible I taped a cloth measuring tape to a tabletop and marked each length with the number I needed to cut with sticky notes. So all it took was to stretch some string out and clip at the needed point. Keep these in groups at this point forward; it will make it far easier later. I looped and crimped the ends, then hung them in groups on a curtain rod weighted down by an ornament.
To figure out where my rings would fall on the rack I tied a cotton string to my center point and marked it at 1.5 inch intervals. Then I swung the string around and put as many hooks as I needed on each given ring. I usually put them on the X and Y-axis first, then filled in the quadrants.
And after this I attached a hook into my ceiling and hung the rack. I found the best way to hang everything is to work from the center out, hang each set of lengths of monofilament string spacing it around it’s designated ring as evenly as possible, then hang ornaments before moving on to the next set of lengths of string. By weighing the strings down as you go along it will help them from getting tangled as you work. You can add or move string, and move ornaments around if needed. I didn’t worry too much about getting everything just perfect and I think it worked to my advantage, the slightly controlled randomness gives it a nice, organic look.
