A Wirey Mess Becomes A Flower - Day 31 - The 100 Day Project

Another rummaging expedition on Day 31 of The 100 Day Project and I'm going round for a second time.

I returned to my wire and bead drawer and removed a tangle of telephone engineers wire. Hmmmm. What can I do with this? Well, before we get to that let's talk a bit about the wire.

I picked up the abandoned tangle of wire from beside a telephone junction box on my street. Presumably left behind by a an untidy engineer. It was a good time ago and it's been left, dumped in the drawer ever since.

Each of the colour combinations serves a different function or purpose within the telephone engineering system, helping engineers to identify and work with different wires and their connections. The color codes are part of the UK standard for telecommunication wiring and are used to ensure they get the right wires in the right place when carrying out repairs, or installations.

There are loads of different colour combinations, Here's a brief explanation of just a few of them to give an idea of what they are about:

Green/Black: Used for the main phone line from the street.
Blue/White: Usually the secondary phone line.
Orange/White: Used for the third line.
Brown/White: Fourth line.
White/Green: Used for the ring wire.
A-Wire: White with blue rings
B-Wire: Blue with white rings
C-Wire: White with orange rings
D-Wire: Orange with white rings

Before I set about using the wires to create something for the cluster book I decided to have a quick tidy up of the drawer from this:

to this:

This tidying up is becoming a bit of a habit and I like it. 💪

I didn't actually have a plan of what to do with the wire so I just started playing around with it. I ended up creating a red circle and then added another coloured wire around the perimeter of that and then another one.

It reminded me of a flower for some reason so I grabbed 3 more strands of wire and platted them to make a stem. Then I reapeated the whole process a couple more times, ending up with 3 "flowers".

Next I tore some strips from old book pages and stuck the wire to them. Of the 2 pages I had left to fill in the cluster book I chose the map paper to stick them to. This was because the map is quite complex whilst the design is pretty straight forward.

And here's the end result.

So, with that done, I now have one more set of clusters to create, plus a cover and some instructions. I also need to assemble the book and finish the card. All in 3 days. 😱

The race is on.