Plug all the light strips into one another end-to-end and test to be sure they're all working.
Once you're sure they're bullet-proof, waterproof the strips by filling your clear heat shrink (you remembered the heat shrink right?) with hot glue and shrinking it down while the glue is wet, covering the solder joints and encasing them in molten plastic. Be sure the heat shrink fuses tightly around the connectors as well. This will keep out water, dust, or any other contaminants.
Be sure to avoid burns and injury when heating heatshrink.
Unroll your garden edging and stake it out in the sunshine on a sunny afternoon. Let the sun warm it up and then let it cool down again, and the curl should come right out.
If you don't have a sunny afternoon available, you can also straighten it out with a heat gun, but this is pretty labor-intensive. This stuff is fabulously heat-sculptable though.
You'll need clear silicone caulk, and a lot of it. I found that one tube would cover about 7-8 feet. We're using this to glue the silicone sleeve on the LEDs to the track, and also to attach the crystal diffusers, so get more than you think you'll need.
I cut the tracks to exactly the length of my LED strips and zip-tied the LEDs to the track to hold it together for gluing. In retrospect, I wish I'd kept the tracks a few inches longer than the LED strip on one end, to make them overlap a bit on the ends for a smoother line.
Any gaps in the LED strip and connectors will be obvious dark spots in your final design, so plan to get the ends of the strips as close to each other as possible.
I also drilled a hole in the track to feed the connectors through to the back.
Put the lights on the opposite side of the track from the tabs, so your stakes will be hidden behind the track.
Lay out the track sections on a bit of 2x4 so it lays flat on your table. Start by running a bead of silicone down the middle and gluing the LED strip onto it. Then, add a very generous amount of silicone over and around the strip and gently press the gems into the silicone. It comes out white at first, but dries clear (provided you bought the clear-drying kind -- you did, right?)
The silicone takes 5-7 days to fully dry, but I found these were handle-able within 2-3 days. It works really well to secure the silicone sleeve to the track, and the gems all stick really firmly as well. They are flexible and bendable and I don't feel like I'm in any danger of losing gems. And the diffusion is absolutely lovely.
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