Been wrestling with iron wire – need to make the foldable tree come true. Never knew it would be such a pain in the ass. The wire is difficult to cut, unwieldy to handle and impossible to twist. Had to evenly distribute the wire-taming over two whole days, or else my arms would have given up on me.

Major problem was that the wire tries to retain its coils at all cost (coils being the way the wire  is shaped when one  buys it). The tree trunk is a plastic tube, the wire that will be the core of the branches goes into the tube all the way to the bottom, and the plastic kept bending because the wire has such a great memory for shape. Tried to solve this by adding an iron bar, this worked for a day then the bar gave in and let the wire take over. So I had to dismantle the whole thing, perform a lot of bending on the wire to make it forget its roundness, then reassembled, iron bar included for good measure.

The tree trunk has been straight now for 3 days, so I can rest assured it will not go bendy on me again. I will now start clothing the structure with fiberfill and an outer layer of black tricot (from old T-shirts of course). Note:  add Sort BV – donors of T-shirts) to the sponsors for the Heilige Huisjes exhibition. Note: don’t ever go into iron wire art.