Hurricane Irene Hurricanes Tutorial

Use the fallout from Hurricane Irene to make some candle holders so you can survive the next power outage in style!

While Mike and I were off visiting my sister in Atlanta, Richmond got the smackdown from Hurricane Irene. Trees were falling, power was out and food was spoiling. Honestly, if I hadn’t been playing with my sisters (which I’d choose over just about anything, even witnessing a real natural disaster), I would have loved to be here to see the action go down. I personally think a weekend of Little House on the Prairie living sounds pretty freaking awesome. Grilling dinner outside? No cell phone service? Knitting by candlelight? Yes please.

Instead, we arrived home Monday night to an eerily dark neighborhood. The city looked, well, messy. Like my craft room mid-craft messy. (Let’s be honest. The city clean up crews will have Richmond looking like the respectably tidy southern city it is in far less time then they’d be able to sort through my yarn stash or color code my fabric scraps.) Sadly, I don’t think kids are going to be enjoying this playground anytime soon.

Nor are these poor people going to be using their front door.

As I walked around surveying the damage on Tuesday, I couldn’t help but think that all those trees the wind had ripped out and thrown all over the place should find their eternal resting place in my house. I needed to get some of that beautifully barky texture into our home, somehow someway. The trick was doing it in a way that wouldn’t cause another natural disaster, of the marital sort. As cool as a 12-foot tree trunk installation would be in our dining room, I’m pretty sure Mike would have vetoed it sight unseen.

After we cleaned out the fridge of everything that could have possibly gone bad during the undeterminably long power outage—i.e. EVERYTHING in our fridge—we had quite a few empty jars on our hands. And that’s where the idea for the Hurricane Irene Hurricanes came from. Why not use the fallen soldiers from this disaster to prepare us to endure another power-eliminating disturbance in style?

You can survive a blackout fashionably too. Here’s how:

1. Find some jars. You really could use any size jar. I happened to use small garlic and ginger jars because that’s what was rotting in my fridge.
2. Pick up sticks. I wandered around the neighborhood snapping thin branches from all the tree limbs people set out for the city to clean up. You don’t have to be as weird and creepy as I probably seemed. Just collect some sticks somehow.
3. Size ‘em up. Use one stick to measure the height of your jar from the bottom of it to where the threaded edge ends at the very tip top. Snap the stick to that length. I found using scissors made this part cleaner and a lot more precise.
4. Repeat. Using that stick as your template, cut a bunch more to be that size.
5. Paint them white. If you’re into that sort of thing. I used acrylic paint because that’s what I had. Spray paint probably would have saved me some time though.
6. Get gluey. Use hot glue to adhere the sticks to the jar. I found putting vertical lines of glue on the jar one at a time and then adding a stick works best. You may notice that the curve of some sticks creates a gap and shows more glass than you’d like. Just use a smaller stick to fill in the space.

7. Add a candle.

The twigs just happen to cast an unexpectedly cool shadow. Way to be, twigs!

8. And perhaps most importantly, buy a generator. Next time the power goes out you can still light your beautiful candles, but you won’t have to replace every single condiment in your fridge. Trust me on this one.