Beautiful Little Vanilla Vases — by Guest Mom Michelle/Scribbit

I love baking with real vanilla beans, they taste like nothing else — there is no substitute. And nearly as wonderful as the beans themselves are the beautiful little glass tubes the beans come in.

For a couple years I saved the tubes because I was sure I'd find something really perfect to do with them and wouldn't you know it — this was the year my creativity finally paid off.

I bought some eight gauge solid copper wire from a local hardware store (I got it for sixty-two cents a foot) and curled it in free-form shapes that clutch the tubes and make standing vases.

To make your own here are a couple tips:

1. Use pliers as little as possible to bend because not only will they nick the wire (even when you protect it with a couple layers of felt) they tend to make bends that aren't as smooth as those you can do with only your fingers.

2. Bend the wire as little as possible — don't unbend and rebend it--because the molecular properties of copper make it so that the more the metal moves the more rigid and difficult to bend it becomes.

3. To get the nice little spirals that hold the vials in place I gently bent the wire into a somewhat tight spiral then stretched it apart. The technique worked well and kept the tubes clutched tightly in place.

If you're not convinced how easy this is or are too busy to make your own, I've put the vase pictured above in my Etsy store for purchase. And if you liked this idea but are hungry for more I'm posting another idea for creating tiny vases from glass tubes at Scribbit. Enjoy!