Bonsais take forever. Years, if you do it right. Tiny adjustments are made maybe every six months and in between you just have to withstand the urge to sculpt and prune it.

That requires far too much patience. So I decided to keep the bonsai look and just get rid of that, you know, alive stuff that takes so long to do what I want.

Here are two wire trees I made a month or so ago, after watching this how-to video.

I used 24 or 26-gauge wire and tiny seed beads. I picked up the halved geodes at a local jewelry store.

I have some experience working with wire – I used to make butterflies and dragonflies and once a Chinese dragon out of it, but I haven’t done much with it in years.

I just like these, though, I think because they have those satisfying bonsai shapes without the guilt that comes with not watering them.

To get them to sit properly on the geodes I bent the wire roots to curl around the rocks and then put a bit of hot glue under the base of the trunk.

I’m working on another  right now that I’d like to try to melt onto the rock instead of glue. Scott has the tools to melt the wire, but I have no idea whether that will actually work or just will destroy the tree in the process. I’ll try to document the experiment, if I can manage to do that while not wrecking my new wire tree and/or any of my fingers.

The new tree I’m working on will have slightly different “leaves.” I bought these quirky, irregularly shaped beads that kind of remind me of pine needles when they’re all bunched together. We’ll see if the resemblance holds when the tree is done.

They’re also very tiny and I hope to complete my wire tree before I’ve lost a bunch of them. Unlikely!