The tea light spider is a wall mounted candle holder for tea lights.

With two combination pliers and one straight welding wire you can make a wonderful present.

A lot of variations are possible and only limited by your imagination.

About the wire: I took the cheapest wire I could find in the hardware store.
It looks as if it has a core of iron and some copper coating. Diameter it about 0.8-1mm and length 100cm.
You could also try this with other thick wire, but this welding wire is ideal. It is elastic to a certain degree what means it's not so soft like pure copper, and you can form nice straight parts. Just start with a thin one and then shift to thicker diameters if you like.

Step 1: Starting to Bend

If you're not living in the year 3000 and have a robot friend called Bender, then you have to do this all by yourself! But hey, don't worry, it isn't so hard.

Take the straight welding wire, a metering rule and mark the middle of the wire. Then take the two pliers and bend the wire right in the middle, so you get a small loop on one side and two endings on the other. You can also use a small nail to get the loop real good shaped.

As you can see from the pictures I only used one small plier and my hand to bend the wire. Do it as you like.

Didn't match the middle?
The legs are of different length?
Well no problem, as long as it is only a few centimeters that doesn't matter. We will take care of that later.

Step 2: Forming the Head

Now we start to work the spider from the loop to the legs.

Take one of the plier, hold the double wire and bend the rest with the other one.

The shape is just a rough suggestion. If your wire is much longer than mine you have to enlarge the upper and lower legs. If it is much shorter, vice versa.

Go ahead and bend it down to the cage for the tea light.

Step 3: The Cage for the Tea Light

So far, we have a rather two dimensional building. Now it is time to go 3d!

Grip one leg in the middle of the existing cage and carefully turn the wire to the outside. Turn the second one to the other side.
Now you can already see where this is leading to. The cage for the tea light is ready. If you want you can solder the two legs together to make the whole thing more rigid. But if you bent it right you don't need to.

Step 4: Bend the Legs

Now take the legs at the lower end of the tea light cage and carefully bend them to the outside and back at the same time. This is a bit of a tricky part, because the angle is not fixed. You just have to see how much bending they need and maybe adjust it to serve your needs.
Finally bend the last centimeter of the legs down again so that it touches the ground / wall.

Step 5: Final Adjustments

So now you may have something looking like a tea light spider, but yours is buckled and the tea light nearly falls of the cage. What to do now?

Go and find a nail in the wall. If you don't have any, plug a new one in somewhere!

Now you have different possibilities if it doesn't fit:

If the cage is not level, then first of all, correct this! Bend the cage in level and the upper legs in a suitable angle.
Then finish the legs.
If it doesn't work the first time. Get yourself some coffee, look at it and try it a new.
It's hard to describe and the first ones I made were also quite buckled. But once you try it you get the feeling for the length and angles. It's really easy.

Step 6: Dressing

I don't want to provide much in this step, but leave it up to you to be creative. You could:

- make a lamp shade
- make the cage bigger to take up a glass in which the tea light burns
- paint the tea light spider
- hang it up a window with a vacuum cup, but be careful as in case of a failure the burning candle might fall.
- hang it in the bathroom on the tiled wall with vacuum cups
- give it to your friends.

Keep in mind, that the aluminium container of a tea light might get hot when the tea light burns down!
It's also possible that the spider might get a bit warm, but as it is quite filigree the temperatures keep in range...