Bendigo, Victoria · Final Batch

The Verandah Tree

Hand-Bent Wire Tabletop Tree

For twenty-nine years Lyn Carmody has sold her work at the same two markets — Bendigo and Castlemaine — and for the last several years posted them out as well, mostly to people who found her stall once and then wanted one for a daughter interstate. Eighteen Christmases ago she started bending the trees. Close to two thousand of them since, all out of one rented shed on the edge of town.

In August the building sold. This is the last batch she's making to sell.

The new owners are putting up storage units and her lease runs to the end of February. She'd rather there was no fuss about it: her hands are fine and nobody pushed her out. At sixty-seven she decided she'd rather not spend a year looking at sheds and carting the bench across town. The bench is coming home to the back room, the forms are coming with it, and she'll go on making them for her daughters and grandkids at whatever pace she likes. What ends with the building is the piecework, not the craft.

The idea came from her grandmother

Who never had a tree — too hot, too much carry-on. What she had was a bare branch in a jug out on the verandah with bits of cut glass hung off it. About seven o'clock the light would come in flat and sideways under the roof and the whole thing would light up, while a proper tree sat inside in a room nobody had been in since lunch.

That's what this is: something for the table everyone's actually sitting at.

Designed by subtraction

Lyn built the first one because she was tired of being sold somebody else's winter — snowmen, frosted pine, spray-on frost in a can, in December, in Bendigo. So she set herself a rule and took things away instead of adding them. No green. No red. No snow, no frost, nothing pretending at cold. Nothing printed, nothing moulded, nothing that dates in four years.

What's left is a shape with air in it, eighteen clear drops that take their colour from whatever room they're in, and gold wire — because gold is what the light here actually does at seven in the evening. It's less than a Christmas decoration usually is. That's the point of it.

What Lyn does to each one

• Bends the wire by hand into its spiral, turn by turn, around the same wooden form she's used since the first batch
• Winds the light strand inside the spiral, so the bulbs sit behind the drops instead of in front of them — the difference between something that glitters and something that just glows
• Hangs all 18 faceted acrylic drops individually, so no two sit at the same height on the same turn
• Sets the star last

The wire, the drops, the LED strand and the base are sourced. Everything after that is her bench.

Specifications

Batteries not included.

Acrylic, on purpose

Her grandmother's drops were glass and, in Lyn's words, lethal — one went on the tiles every year. These are faceted acrylic. A grandchild knocks it off the table and you pick it up again. For something that lives outdoors with twelve people around it, that's the right call.

Why it runs on batteries

Because there's no power point on the verandah where you want it, and nobody wants a cord across a step with everyone walking past. So it goes where the people are: out to the table before lunch, back to the kitchen sill after, inside if the wind gets up in the evening.

Where people put them

• The long table, from noon until the light goes
• Balcony or verandah table, where the drops pick up the last flat gold hour of the day
• Kitchen windowsill, on in the early morning before it gets hot
• Front room or hall table — the parts of the house that never get decorated
• Posted interstate, which is how most of her repeat customers started

Our returns policy is in addition to your rights under the Australian Consumer Law. Drops are faceted acrylic, not glass. The light is warm and close-range — it makes the drops sparkle; it does not project patterns onto walls.