Tutorial: Summer Time Chime

My husband set aside a few days last week to clean the garage. He's a truly great man. Had you seen our garage before the clean-up you'd think so too. It was a colossal mess before he swooped in. He wrangled that eyesore into shape, and while he was at it, he managed to dig up a few goodies, namely a few old stakes of bamboo that were still in decent shape. I decided to snag them for my Point of View project, hee hee: the summer time chime.

Now I know how clever you are. You? You don't need a tutorial for this. You could make this chime with your eyes glued shut and both hands sticky-taped behind your back. Nevertheless, I will walk you through what I did.

Tutorial: Summer Time Chime

You will need:

• A bamboo stake or two
• A stick (like, from a tree)
• A drill with small drill bit
• A handsaw (I tried the miter saw but it shredded the ends of the bamboo so I used a handsaw which worked like a dream.)
• String
• Needle
• Acrylic paints and paintbrush
• Sharpie
• Varnish

Using a handsaw, cut up your bamboo into progressively longer pieces. I cut my pieces 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 inches long.

Paint 'em! Starting with the lightest colour and getting progressively darker, free-hand some designs on your bamboo pieces. Do whatever you like: add stripes, dots, blobs, lines, waves, leaves, the Mona Lisa, whatever... Once you've applied all your paint colours and allowed them to dry, add some details with a Sharpie. Apply a few coats of varnish over the bamboo pieces to make them weather resistant.

Drill holes every 1-1/2 inches (4 cm) in the stick to accomodate the string hangers. The holes in the stick are not too far apart. They have to be the right distance apart to allow the bamboo pieces to hit each other in order to produce that satisfying "bink bonk, bonk bink" sound. If your bamboo is smaller or bigger you may have to adjust the distance between each piece. It's a balance.

Now drill holes through one end of each bamboo piece as well.

Use a large needle to facilitate the stringing process. Thread your string onto the needle. Slipping your threaded needle through the hole in the stick and then the bamboo, attach each bamboo piece to the stick. Knot the ends of each piece of string.

And that, as they say, is that!

Hang your bamboo chime where it can swing freely and listen to its sweet sweet music! It really is too pretty to express in words...

For all the details on all Points of View and to join the linky party, check out this next post.

I'll meet you over there!