I'm curious how you guys are making arches chase like that. If there's already an area explaining this just let me know, but If not I'd be interested in hearing what it took to put that together. It looks awesome.
There are a lot of tutorials on the net, YouTube etc... But here's an explanation of what I did:
10' electrical PVC (Grey) 7 strings of 100 ct minis. decided on 4" on either side for grass/etc (maybe snow for some but not here!). so then a little math: 10' X 12" = 120" - 4" - 4" = 112" / 7(strings) = 16" per string.
So I marked out the PVC with a sharpie at 4" from either end then split the remainder into 16" sections and marked those out. Now we have a PVC with all the marks. time to do the real work.
I took a Craftsman 12mm 1/4" drive shallow socket and squeezed/pounded it into the end of one of the pipes. I took my cordless drill and put in a 1/4" socket driver bit and put the drill into low gear. Now we have a way to spin the pipe.
So then I took a string of minis and cut off the string along socket and insulated the cut wires with heat shring tubing. I then wound the string on in a way that it kind of hold itself on. (lay down a bit of the string and wind over it. hard to explain). I wound it tightly and at the half way point (two wires between the bulbs instead of 3) checked my measurement to make sure I was on track. If it was going a little long (less than 8 inches remaining till the next mark) I overlapped it some to make the mark pretty close. Then I taped the end of the string to the pipe just before the first bulb making sure to keep it wound tight.
Then I would check each string after winding with the plug still attached to make sure I didn't stretch it to death (never happened) and cut the plug off and attached my 18/2 wire with solder and heat shrink tubing. taped it down the pipe at about 16 inch intervals (not covering up your marks though).
Then I repeated it until 7 strands were on. the part I never really solved was how to keep the pigtails from madly twisting around the uncovered pipe and themselves. (I left 10' of wire beyond the PVC for each strand (to go to my Express), with each one a few inches longer than the last to aid in identification).
The last thing I did in the house was bundle all of the 18/2 cables together with some large heat shrink tubing. I used 1" pieces every 16 or so inches. not covering it at all really but it really helps keep the wires from becoming a birdnest. I wired the leads directly into my Express, because I am too cheap to buy all those extension cords.
Of course there are innumerable different ways to accomplish this but this was my way. I am really cheap and would rather do extra work than spend money. I'm sure you could leave the ends on the light strands and use extension cords but it wouldn't be as clean.
Plus I took all those cut off ends and some more 18/2 cable that I had and made my own extension cords for other areas of my display.
