As I have mentioned before, most of the materials I use come from charity shops. Every so often though, I find I need to buy “proper” stuff – you know, new things; like equipment (hello haemostats), or glue, or specialist bits and bobs (waxed linen thread? Specialist quilt batting? A very particular type of bead?) to enable me to create what I want to create.

I always dither over these purchases. For one thing, specialist things that are not to be found in charity shops are generally expensive (especially once you add on postage costs, because they’re not usually to be found in any old local shop). And they’re often also hard to find. But sometimes, the process of tracking them down and parting with money just cannot be avoided.

The other day I found myself painting silver wire black yet again – a process that is both fiddly and messy. My fingers were covered in black paint, my tablecloth acquired a few more black blobs and suddenly my mind just unravelled and I thought NO MORE! And I decided there and then to stop being such a cheapskate and just BUY some black wire.

Cue much bimbling about on t’internet. I knew I didn’t want plastic coated wire, because some of the wire will be used with the sort of clay that gets baked in the oven and plastic-coated wire goes all melty and smelly and toxic. But it seems that not all online wire vendors are clear about whether their wire is coated in plastic or not.

I decided that the best sort of wire would be the sort that those clever artists that make wire sculptures use. It looked neither too fat or too thin, would be flexible and definitely wasn’t covered in plastic.

But could I find any? No I couldn’t. For a start, I didn’t know what exactly to refer to it as. Or even what it was made of. The silver and gold wire I use is made from aluminium, but all of the black aluminium wire I tracked down seemed to be plastic coated. Or painted with acrylic (i.e. plastic) paint. As did anything described as “craft wire” or “jewellery wire”. Most frustrating.

Finally, I had a lucky break. I stumbled upon an internet emporium that could only be described as a God-send. I have a few of these bookmarked now.

They are the online equivalents of the funny little shops harking from a bygone age that are tucked away on shabby, mostly abandoned streets in the wrong part of town and staffed by elderly men wearing brown coats. They specialise in one obscure thing and one thing only and they sell every variety of that thing that you could ever possibly imagine – and many more besides, including varieties so weird that you never even knew they existed. (My favourite such online emporium sells only glass eyes. Imagine! There really is a shop that sells nothing but glass eyes!)

These are invariably shops that you stumble across by chance and think “oooh, if I ever need any… {insert item on sale} I will come here for it!” But then when you eventually, months or years later, find you do need some of whatever it is, you can’t seem to find the shop again. Either because you can’t remember exactly where it was, or because it has closed down and the street it was on seems to have been demolished. Or perhaps it just vanished in a puff of smoke because it never really existed, a bit like the costume shop in Mr Benn; or Aunt Mill’s shop in Haythorne Thwaite in The Magic Ball; or Emily’s shop in Bagpuss.

Anyway, I stumbled upon an online emporium of wire. It sells wire, JUST wire, in many, many types. And it had what I wanted. Admittedly it came only in a slightly larger quantity than I really needed, but I was so happy to find it I just jumped right in and bought it anyway. Loads of it.

I shall probably never need to buy black wire again. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

I was so carried away with joy at my purchase that when it arrived I started thinking about all the other things I could do with it. Wired and fired up I was, ha ha! Well, that, and also… well… I have a humungous great roll of it to use.

The upshot of this was that I decided to have a go at making a bed. Because once upon a time I’d seen an image on Pinterest of a doll bed made from wire and I thought “how hard can it be?”

After I’d looked at pictures of wire doll beds I realised that it probably was going to be harder than I had thought. The beds all looked very complicated indeed, involving much twisting and wrapping wire curls and curlicues, several different “gauges” of wire, specialist tools and even soldering and goodness knows what else.

So I just winged it and had a go anyway, without troubling myself with any of those things, just using what I had.

My first attempt was, admittedly, a bit wonky. But I think it’s wonkiness is an asset, bestowing charm rather than implying incompetence or instability. My fingers did get a bit sore, but despite that I enjoyed making it so much that I made another. Which turned out a bit less wonky.

And then I made mattresses, and quilts, and pillows, too – using some of the prettiest, titchiest bits of fabrics from my special scraps bag. Which was even more fun!

I haven’t decided yet whom I will create to sleep in them.

That’s a story for another time… ♥