Coconut midrib arrangement

Long blog hiatus..!
In between moving houses and sprucing the new place up ( done mostly by J, but still ), I have neglected my blog.
Anyhow, am back with a project that I did months and months ago...but it was something that I made for my parents home and had left it there. I had the project steps, but no good final picture. Last time I went there, I took some pictures.
The inspiration was a similar arrangement that i saw at a relative's place. She had bought hers, but I knew I could do it on my own. My mother saw a way to curl the midribs on a television show and then of course we HAD to do it.
The coconut midrib is the thin, hard and slightly flexible strip found in the middle of the coconut leaf. In Kerala and most of south India these are tied together to make brooms.
Materials needed
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Coconut midrib ( not too old, do it while its still greenish yellow) or you could use thin strips of rattan or bamboo
Metallic paint (I used fevicryl metallic bronze)
superglue
beads (make sure the beads will go at least halfway through the midrips or rattan strips.
paint brushes
My mother had done the first part, sorry no pictures of that. Wind the coconut midrib (or rattan)around a cylindrical object, My mother used an old PVC pipe. If you tie each one individually you will get nicer curls. Umma had just tied it all bunched together, so its kinda wavy, I prefer it this way :-). Tie it nice and tight and forget about it. I mean leave it in a corner for about a month or so.
Here are some of the midribs after I removed them from the pipe. Now you might want to cover you work surface as the next step can get messy. I spread newspapers on the floor and was ready to go.


Next, I used the metallic paint and painted the midribsdirty fingers and even dirtier paint brush...eowww!!

After drying them, I slid beads into them and stuck it on using super glue.
I used only two or three beads per midrib. The idea was to make it look airy and light. The first bead went as far along as it would go into the midrib and the rest were evenly spaced.

That's its!, do it for the rest of the midribs and you have an easy showpiece.

Here it is in a tall vase that my juniors from college gave me as a wedding gift <
Btw I painted all the ribs first and then beaded it. You could do it whatever way suits you. Also while painting, you may want to do one side of the midribs (they are kinda cubical, funny how you notice it only when you paint em ), dry them and go over to the other side, because other wise you ll have paint marks wherever you leave them to dry, on the floor, or leaning against the wall. Here is another arrangement using different colours and no beads.The terracotta vase is an unfinished project of mine. I will do a post on that someday.