My First Tree

After many years being told I was not artistic. My husband and I attended a workshop that our friend Linette Penney Gainham of Penney Lane Studios, was running on wire trees. There I made my very first wire tree. (For the whole story see About page).

We started by taking 5, 7, 9 pieces of thick garden wire approximately 2mm thick and about 12-14 inches long, Man! They were hard to cut. We then started to wrap these together with mossing wire about 0.5mm thick. We wrapped them from about 2inches up, (for all you younger folks 5cm!). You’ll need to forgive me as I often switch from old to new measurements all the time (brought up at that in between stage, you know what I mean? LOL!).

Anyway, we wrapped the middle portion and then started to open up the branches at different places and continued to wrap the branches all the way out and back again. Wrap, wrap wrap! And you got it. Wrap, wrap, wrap! We even got a few giggles in while we were working, even better!

So now that we had a trunk and branches, we added on some smaller branches by using the thin wire and attached them to the main branches.

We splayed out the parts at the bottom to form the roots, as you’ll be able to see from the photos I curled mine round at the end which gave the tree stability. All of course under the watchful eyes of Linette. And here it is a work in progress. I know it looks minimalistic, but considering it’s just wire and I’m not artistic, (I’d get slapped for saying that, LOL!). It does have the look of a tree.

So onto the good part, adding lots of coloured (I love colour!) wire and various trinkets to the tree. Linette had a huge range, so we all got to rummage through.

It was amazing watching everyone else’s trees taking shape, the ideas and contrasts were amazing. Some had brought some favourite bits and bobs to add to their trees, along with wool, fabric, etc.

Anyway, back to the point, (rabbit trails happen all the time, so please be aware not to fall down the holes!). I added different colours of thicker wire up the trunk and made each branch a different colour.

I found some little bells that sounded really great, some cogs, metal leaves, love charms, keys and to top it all off I found a wooden butterfly (that to me speaks of transformation and new beginnings, which this day was for me!).

Finally, Linette pulled out some rice lights and as I wound them up the tree and switched them on, the little tree took on a whole new look. Tahdah!!!!

I was very proud of my little tree! (You’d never have guessed would you?). You can just see the butterfly lying across the top.

It took the whole day and lots of winding of wire, I had sore wrists by the end of the day, but I had caught the bug, finally something I could put my imagination to!

The only other thing I did was to paint the butterfly, nothing can be plain around me, for long!

This happened in February 2020, just a month before the first COVID lockdown. Perfect timing or what?