Making Conifers

Recently purchased a new tool and materials from Micro Mark, to create evergreen trees.
The idea is to run a bead of glue down a soft iron wire, then spread Chinese bristles relatively evenly along the wire, and let set up long enough to have the bristles tacked to the wire but not so long to adhere the wire and bristles to the wax paper they suggest you place under the wire.
Then you put another bead of glue on top of the bristles centered on the wire and add a second wire on the glue and let set for a time.
At this point you are ready to use the tool to do the next step.

I found this worked OK, but was a little awkward, seeing that the wire was just loose, and spreading the bristles on the glued wire tended to move the wire, and make the whole process a bit tentative, messy, and hard to keep the fibers where you wanted them.

So I decided to build a simple jig shown below to hold the wire in position during the gluing process, which I think really made the system work much better and with more control.

Jig tools & materials

Clamped wire in jig

I’ll continue the process on the next post