Decorating with water beads

I've seen water beads used before, but I've never had any of "my own" to play with until now.  They are so soothing to run your hands through!  If you aren't familiar with water beads, they come in packets of little dry crystals.  When you add water, they expand to several times their size into perfectly round little balls that hold water.  You can use them for decorative purposes and they reflect nearby colors, but I've also heard that you can grow certain plants in them because the beads release water.
Anyway, I got to take home a floral centerpiece from a banquet we were at recently, and the vase had water beads floating in it.  When I topped off the vase with water a few days later, the beads looked like they had disappeared because they floated down.  I forgot about them and was quite surprised today when I dumped the water out of the vase into the sink and there they were!  They are supposedly reusable for years, as long as you rinse them off in-between uses, so I pulled some creativity out of the deep recesses of my brain to figure out a different way to display them.