DIY... Fake Flitters Wind Catcher

A couple weeks back while at Pat Catan's for our 3rd weekend in a row (yes, Crafting junkies!), I was roaming the store in a low blood sugar daze.  I'm not diabetic or at least I'm not a medically diagnosed diabetic...  I laugh about how I eat so much sugar, I've been self medicating for years!

At any rate, wandering the store aimlessly, I ended up in the Wicker section and found fake butterflies.  These are the type that appear to be made of the same material fake feathers are.  I fell in love with them and wanted to make a wind catcher.  I could have sworn I saw something on etsy where someone had tied fishing line to a metal ring and strung butterflies off of that.  On my way out of the isle, I caught a glimpse of  miniature twig hearts and bought those to add weight to the fishing line.  It wasn't until I had made it home, that I realized there were 3 different sizes of mini hearts in the pack.  With that in mind, I decided to make a better base for hanging fishing line out of the large hearts.  After a bit of elbow grease, brown copper wire, messing with my cats and some hot glue, I ended up with this.

To make this, you will need the following:
5 large twig hearts
1 med twig heart
5 small twig hearts
1 yard of 20 gauge brown copper wire (at the most)
2 yards of monofilament aka fishing line
15 1.5 inch fake butterflies
low melt glue gun
pliers to cut wire and make bending easier

First, I arrange the Twig hearts in such a way that they lined up properly.  This took some trial and error as each heart was slightly different in shape.  After aligning, I began to tie the hearts together with the copper wire.  There is no special way to bind them, just to make them tight enough that they wall fall apart.

After all of the hearts were together to make the base, I tied the medium heart to the base using several pieces of wire.  As this was my first wind catcher, the next one will have braided wire connecting the medium heart.  The purpose of adding this heart was to give the base a little more dimension than just putting the hanging loop directly onto the base.  After attachment of the medium heart, I twisted 3 pieces of wire together and wrapped the loose wire at the end of the loop onto the medium heart.  At this point, the base is finished.

Next I started on the fishing line dangles.  I cut 5 roughly 20 inch lengths of line and tied one end of a piece of monofilament to each of the 5 small hearts, then tied the other end to the the base.

Each filament was tied to a separated heart located inside the base and was tied at various random lengths to give a more flowing look.  At this point, I taunted the cats a little then went to arranging the butterflies.  I chose to arrange them prior to gluing so it wasn't so haphazard.

Just a fair warning....cat's are obsessed with fake butterflies and will claim them as their own.

I used a low melt hot glue gun to glue the butterflies to the monofilament as I didn't know how high temp hot glue would affect the fishing line.  As the line was rolling every which way, I glued the butterflies around the line.  This way as it blew in the wind, you would always have a chance of seeing the front of a butterfly rather than it's rear.