String Lighting Loveliness

I love, love, love string lights! Last year we had some round Christmas lights up over the patio but they were strung kind of wonky and then somehow half of them stopped working (still blaming the tree trimmers for that). But there is a silver lining to that story now! I've loved the bigger globe string lights for a long time. Starting with this picture I spotted a long time ago, before pinterest was around, to be exact.

Picture from here

Then I started seeing similar pictures all over pinterest, but could never quite think of a way to get them strung properly for our particular set up. The house is just too far away to be quite right, the fence is a different height, on and on. We thought about a pergola, but that would be way too much work and too expensive. Long story short, I finally spotted this picture from Southern Living and had that "ah-ha" moment.

Picture from here

Luckily, Joe was totally on board with the idea and was the brains behind the execution of the project. We wanted a semi-permanent set up, but also loved the idea of being able to take it with us to our next place. We basically cemented our bamboo poles into our buckets using the beams in the garage to keep everything straight while the cement dried. Then Joe used eyelet hooks and "s" hooks to hang the lights. I keep forgetting to take pictures during the day, so here's some slightly blurry evening shots :)