A group of participants in the FabLab working on their wire trees.
It’s autumn in the Berkshires, and the hillsides have transformed into a living mosaic of yellow, orange, and red. Every bend in the road feels like a painting. It’s the kind of season that makes you slow down and breathe deeply, and that invites reflection and creativity alike. As the temperatures drop and daylight shortens, people naturally turn toward warm, tactile projects, something to do indoors while still feeling connected to the changing world outside.
Inside the FabLab at Williams, the tables were covered with coils of copper wire, bowls of fall-colored beads, and smooth palm-sized rocks gathered from nearby paths. Students filled the space, laughing, chatting, and ready for some creativity. More than a crafting session, it was a moment of community. Some students designed these fall wire tree centerpieces as gifts for friends or family, and others planned to display theirs on desks or windowsills, a reminder of the Berkshires’ fleeting colors.
Examples of the completed wire trees.
To get started, you need only a few simple tools: a ruler, a rock, a pair of wire cutters, hot glue, and of course, plenty of wire and beads. It’s helpful to measure and cut the wire strands ahead of time to about 5 inches per strand.
The process of creating a fall wire tree centerpiece begins quite simply with the rock. The base grounds the wire tree. A flat, stable rock works best, especially since the finished tree can grow unexpectedly heavy once adorned with dozens of beads. The balance of weight and width matters: you want the stone to hold the span of the tree’s branches so that the sculpture stands upright.
Once the base is chosen, the creativity begins. You start from the ground up, forming the roots, then the trunk, and finally the branches. When it comes time to form the trunk, a bit of strength is required. You twist multiple boughs together, compressing them into a single sturdy column. It’s worth studying real tree forms or even looking at reference photos online to understand how trunks curve and how roots flare out. This reminder of how art is connected with ecology is part of an idea called biomimicry, the study of how nature’s solutions inspire sustainable human innovation (to read more, see the Biomimicry Institute here).
Once the trunk is done, it helps to focus on the primary branches, and then the smaller offshoots. After that comes the most time-consuming but perhaps most rewarding step: adding the foliage. Every bead must be threaded, secured, and adjusted, one at a time. Each leaf cluster begins by threading a bead onto a wire strand and looping it in place, twisting the ends together to secure it. It is meditative work. Some students in the FabLab played quiet music as they worked, and others chatted about classes or what they did on Mountain Day.
Twisting the roots around the rock is the next step, and though it is not always visible in the final display, it’s vital to the sculpture’s integrity. After securing the tree to its base, students used a bit of hot glue to hold the tree down, then gave it one last round of adjustments.
Beyond its aesthetic beauty, this project embodies something larger. Crafting a fall wire tree centerpiece merges creativity with design thinking, transforming simple materials into a meaningful object through a process of iteration and visualization. As Susan Biali Haas reports in Psychology Today, research even shows that working with our hands strengthens spatial reasoning and fosters mindfulness (read more here).
By the end of my workshop, the sun was dipping low behind the Berkshire hills, setting the horizon ablaze with pink and orange. The students packed up their tools, chatting about weekend plans, when they would see each other next, and ideas for future workshops I could hold.
While real leaves will soon scatter and decay, the copper wire and fall-colored beads will continue to catch the light long after the snow begins to fall.