What it takes
to make one

• 8mm faceted glass teardrops, top-drilled. Top-drilled matters more than anything else on this list — a centre-drilled bead hangs sideways and there is no fixing it. AB coated if you want the piece to throw colour rather than just look green. Why the coating decides that.
• 0.3mm or 0.5mm plated copper wire. 0.3mm threads easily and is cheaper; 0.5mm holds a curve instead of hanging limp. Match the colour to your chain — the wire shows between the beads.
• A small pot or basket with a solid base. Around 2.7″ across for a small piece, 4.5″ for a large one. It has to carry the weight of every strand without tipping, so heavier is better than prettier.
• Chain and a clasp or ring — 8″ of chain suits a small piece, 12″ a large one.
• Flush cutters and round-nose pliers. Not scissors: they crush plated wire and leave a burr that catches.

Roughly: a small piece is a couple of hundred beads over ten or so strands, and a large one runs to several hundred over roughly twice that. Beyond that I would be guessing on your behalf — the count depends on your pot, your strand lengths and how densely you space the beads, and those are decisions you make as you go rather than numbers to look up.

Buy more than you calculate. The beads are top-drilled and the drill hole is the weak point, so a hairline crack there survives the post and then breaks while you are stringing — usually after the strand is already threaded. Running short mid-piece is worse than it sounds, because a replacement batch may not match: AB colour comes from film thickness and it varies between coating runs.

Knowing what to buy is the easy half, and I have just told you. Actually getting it is the half that costs money. I spent days on this before I ever sold anything.

• Batches that arrived centre-drilled when the listing said top-drilled. Unusable, whole bag.
• Acrylic sold as glass, indistinguishable in a product photo and useless on a wall.
• Coatings that came off under a thumbnail — dipped lacquer sold with the same two letters as a vapour-deposited film.
• Greens that were nothing like the photograph, and greens that were right but could not be ordered twice, because nobody in the chain knew which coating run they came from.

Every one of those is a small amount of money and a week gone, and I paid for a lot of them before I found the bead I use now. Then I bought it properly — by the strand, at freight volume — which is the only way the price comes down.

So the packs are not a product line. They are that search, already done. Same beads as every piece I sell, sorted by hand for chipped facets and cracked drill holes before they are sealed, and I can tell you how they behave in a window because I have strung a few hundred plants out of them.

Every bead is handled on its own. Threaded, positioned along the wire, then locked in place so it can never travel. Then the next one. Several hundred times, for one plant.

There is no step in this that scales and nothing you can batch. You cannot do all the threading and then all the fixing; each bead has to be finished before the next one goes on, or the ones behind it slide. That is the entire reason these cost what they cost, and it is the part people underestimate before they start rather than after.

The strands then have to be built to different lengths, gathered, and anchored into a pot that will carry the weight of all of them without tipping or pulling loose. Get the lengths wrong and it hangs like a fringe instead of foliage — and you will not know until it is hanging, because a piece looks completely different suspended than it does laid on a table.

• Centre-drilled beads. The single most common ordering mistake, and it makes the whole bag unusable for this.
• Acrylic sold as glass. Looks identical in a listing photo, throws almost nothing on a wall, and scuffs.
• Wire too thin. Under 0.3mm will not hold a curve, so the strands hang dead straight and the piece reads limp.
• Loose twists. Beads that can slide will migrate down the strand over weeks and pool at the bottom.
• Running short of one colour. Order the whole piece in one go, from one batch.
• Hanging it outdoors. The glass is fine; the plated wire, chain and pot will corrode within a season. These are window pieces.

Every bead is threaded, positioned and twisted individually. There is no step that scales and nothing you can batch. A first attempt means learning the twist, the spacing and the strand lengths while making the thing, and undoing a fair amount of it — so budget days rather than an evening, and do not judge your pace against mine.

It is also hard on your hands. Every bead is a fold and a twist against fine wire, several hundred times over, and the repetition reaches your fingers and wrists well before the piece is finished. Work in short sittings rather than one long one. That is not me trying to put you off — it is the practical reason a large piece takes most people days rather than an afternoon.

In materials alone, making it yourself is cheaper. In materials plus your own hours it is not close, and that is fine — it is the right trade if you want the making, and the wrong one if you only want the object. Plenty of people find out which they wanted somewhere around strand nine.

No judgement at all — I do this for a living and a large one still takes me the better part of a working day. If you got here, read the bit about strand nine, and decided you would rather own one than build one, that is a completely sensible conclusion.

Same beads as everything above, strung by hand in California, USA after you order, dispatched in 6–7 weeks.