Challenges with wire

I work with ordinary iron wire. It's just iron burnt in an oven. It rusts naturally and has a nice black texture with mild blue and green reflections and rusty spots here and there. It often comes covered with a little oil layer to server as a protection against rust.

The most prominent attribute is that it's quite tough and is a tiny flexible by keeping the inner tension. This means two things.

When you bend it, the bend isn't distributed evenly, but often "breaks" in one of the weaker points resulting in uneven bent like the one in the picture. Secondly, it partially returns to it's original form after release.

This makes it hard to create a form around which one could simply wrap a wire. Partially, this can be prevented swiping the wire through a piece of leather or a cloth.

But in general I try to do the following.

• Whenever I can I make the form a bit smaller.
• When wrapping wire around anything, I always keep the wire in tension by pulling it constantly.
• You can twist two wires into a spiral, this interestingly makes the problem go away and looks cool too. I will certainly post an article how to do that.
• When possible, it can be beneficial to leave the wire some space. It'll often bend quite nicely itself, but this needs a bit of skill and needs to be done in one go.

This property can sometimes cause a headache, but it also can help tremendously when done right. The tension itself can keep the wire where it needs to be and keep its shape. When wrapping around a candle, I always overdo it by a lot and when you put it around the candle, the force itself keeps the wire nicely round and tight around it.