Tomato Cage Chandeliers

I made "chandeliers" out of tomato cages five years ago.  They could be real chandeliers if I put a light in them, but they'd probably catch on fire.  Instead, they were temporarily lit up to be photographed.

This is the largest.  The tomato cage is inverted, and the legs are folded at a 90-degree angle toward the center, so you have something to hang it from.

I cut strips of crepe paper, folded one edge over the rim of the cage, and stapled the two layers of paper together.  There's enough clearance on a stapler to do this.

If you put a turnbuckle on top, you can spin it around.  The colors spiral around in color order (orange to yellow to green to blue to purple).

I also made one with three tiers.

The "black" strip isn't really black; it's an illusion from the lighting.  

This is what it looks like with the lights on.  I took a 2" strip of fabric, turned under 1/4" on both edges, and machine stitched them.  Then I glued it over the top edge of the crepe paper.  This looked better than just having lots of little staples showing.  Plus, it added a little interest.  Otherwise, all that crepe paper hanging looked like, well, a bunch of crepe paper hanging.

This was the first one I made.  The strips are fabric and each one is hand sewn to the rim.  I also hand painted the cage a shiny black.  (This was before stores were selling beautifully colored tomato cages.)  Both of those steps were very time-consuming.  And because I knew I wanted multiple chandeliers, I had to come up with a Plan B - hence the crepe paper chandeliers.

This one has the colors inverted, with green at the top and orange at the bottom.

So there you go - now you have something you can try with your old tomato cages if you no longer want to garden with them.