Lalala…

The first assignment for my Design II class is a wire project.  I may be thoroughly sick of wire.  I have nightmares about wire.  I wonder why I always have to be an overachiever and couldn’t just follow the letter of the assignment, which is to create a three dimensional form within another form.  It’s as simple as that…an object within an object.  One of my classmates is doing a bird in a cage, another is running with a Wizard of Oz theme with Dorothy in a tornado.

Me?  I decided to do knowledge.  Go figure.  I have multiple representations of wisdom and knowledge making up my piece.  Eastern dragons symbolize wisdom, as does the pearl they carry.  In Korean mythology, without that pearl, a dragon is just a really big lizard.  I also figured the pearl could also represent a seed (again, of knowledge) and within the seed, a tree (yes, more knowledge).  So my interpretation of the assignment is a dragon surrounding an orb with a tree inside.

Lucky for me, there are piles of old electrical wiring in the basement from the gradual process of rewiring the entire house.  I had help from the family stripping off the insulation and, in some cases, un-plying the stranded wires.  I supplemented this small fortune in copper wire with finer gauge wire from the craft store.

The tree itself gave me the fewest headaches.  The orb that should have been simple, was not quite that.  My plan was to solder the stranded wire at the base and then solder the tree on top of that and figure out a base so that everything stayed upright.  The biggest problem?  I can’t solder for crap.  I did gain a soldering iron and a new pencil torch, though, mostly because I don’t know what I did with my other torch.  Yay, tools!

If I didn’t have E to bounce ideas off and to offer up his own suggestions, I would probably be crying in a corner right now because I couldn’t make the sphere.  Instead, I have both a base for my sculpture and a sphere.  I scavenged for the smallest metal container I could find.  This is where the sample tea containers from Adagio saved me.  I filled the lid with solder and sunk the loose wires of the sphere into it.  Then I ran out of solder, needed more, destroyed the lid pulling the base out and had to find another lid.  I couldn’t build up the metal in a nice, neat shape without that lid and the preexisting base wouldn’t go into the fresh lid, so I melted everything back down again and this time, used more solder.

After the base cooled and I did a bit of cleaning and polishing to brighten up the metal a bit, I shoved the tree inside and wrapped the roots to the bottom of the sphere to secure it.  After that, it was a matter of making the branches “pretty” and making sure everything was contained within the orb and there were no sharp ends sticking out.  I could stop now and have a finished project, but no…that would be too easy.

Up next, somehow fashioning a dragon out of wire.  I’ve already made piles of copper jump rings with the intent of wrapping a wire form in chain mail.  I have until Tuesday to get this done.