DIY Wire Cube Sculpture __ Home Decor Tutorial

So today I was inspired by my new favorite YouTube channel Art Prof to make a little cube out of wire and they have a challenge going on in their channel. Every month they put out an art challenge and this month's challenge was texture cubes. So I did a whole bunch of like paintings and little painted cubes and different things and then finally came up with the idea to do the the wire cube and I got a lot of great response in the Wire Art and Jewelry Makers Club on Facebook. So I'm going to show you guys how to make the cube today. So what you're going to need for the cube are your tools. I have my cutters, flat pliers and round pliers. I'm using 18 gauge wire for the base. In the original I used silver, this one I'm using gold and then you can use a thinner softer wire to fill it in. I'm going to show you how to do the spirals but you could also do just kind of crisscrossing, you could do beads, you can do crochet, the sky is the limit for this. The original I did using a ruler to measure the edges but for this one I made a little template on a jig so I got a 2 inch square of graph paper and just poked four nails into the corners. So we need about 10 or 11 inch piece of the 18 gauge wire and I find the easiest way to do it is just do your first circle freehand here with the pliers. So just with the end of your round pliers just do the little circle and then stick it on the nail and then we can form our other little loops. So hold it straight down, push this around and just turn it, pushing the wire down so it's nice and taut, go around and then I usually just go a little beyond the nail and then pull it back and then that way it's a little straighter. So just push it down as you go, go around the nail and like I said you don't have to use the jig, you can definitely just do it with the ruler but this is a way to get them like a really nice standard size especially for the cube you want all the sides to line up so you do want them to be even. So if your wire gets a little bendy just pull it out and rub it with your finger and then you'll get to the last one and we're just going to go around here and then just finish it and then we'll remove it from the jig and here we're just going to cut that flush in there, squish it down. So we have our square. So an alternative to cutting individual pieces is you can just keep the wire on the roll and you can work with it and just work your way around the jig. So it might mean just like twisting the jig as you go so the wires not too cumbersome but there's different ways that you can do it and this way you don't have to worry about wasting wire because you just cut it as you complete each square. So this is definitely an option if you don't want to cut the individual pieces if you're worried about wasting wire you could definitely do this. So we're going to go around and do the last one and then just bring it around and then we would just lift it off the jig and cut the end as we did previously. So to do the sides of the cube we're just going to do four pieces of wire and we'll just use this as a measurement and bend the wires just like that and we need four the same like that so we want to make sure they all are the same height and if you don't have the jig just measure them on the ruler. So now we're going to take the top and just string it through here and then we want this to stay really solid in place so even if you have to help this along a little bit more if it's stiff it's sometimes better to give it more of a bend with the pliers and then really hold it in place and just give it a bend here okay and just bend it right in there and then we're going to either cut it flush or if you want it super solid you can just take the end and give it another wind around here and then it's going to be very solid and then we can cut it and then what you want to do is get the other side the other like the top or the bottom and then stick it in here and you might want to have it like so these little loose corners don't end up in the same place so we'll just rotate it a little bit stick it in here and then the same thing we want to twist this around so if you have to help it a little bit more just hold it here and bend it up that's so it won't get distorted when you wind it now hold it in place and wind it around a couple of times and then you can cut it and get your flat pliers to just kind of pinch it in place this can take some adjusting so there you have your basic like side and then you want to do the other one so now this one too it's going to be a little wobbly so let's go ahead and bring this one we'll start with the one that's closed end at the top and we're just going to bend that down and bring this one around here it's a little bit tricky to hold it in place slides a little bit but that's why sometimes it's better to cut the wire a little long and then you have more to work with with your ends I find when the ends are too short it's there's not a lot of grout to grab on to so there's this one now this we're going to have to stick it through both of these wires so let's go ahead and stick it through the bottom one first and then this one so it's going to hold those two together so we've stuck it through both of those and let's just make sure it's in the right position yeah so we're just going to same thing we might want to help it a bit with the round pliers just to make it more of a curve there and then we we need to wind it so these two stay together so just push it to the back here and then bring it around there perfect yeah and you'll see the 18 gauge is very solid you could maybe get away with 20 gauge wire if you're if it's going to be a smaller size cube so the bigger the cube the thicker the wire so now you'll see it's a little bit maybe crooked but at that point you can put it on the table and you can you know play around with it smooth the edges if you have to straighten it up and then we're going to add our design so to do the inside design I have this really soft 20 gauge wire that I bought on Etsy when I bought it I didn't think I'd be able to use it because it was too soft for my purposes and then I found it works really well for this chaos style wiring so what you want to do is start with a piece that's two or three feet and basically I start the spiral first and then I'm going to add it to the block after so you can do it around as many times as you want so we'll go around a few times and then you can also like change the direction of your spiral as well so just do it however you like it doesn't have to be you know a perfect design if you decide you want to just do crisscross wires and add beads you can do that too there's many things you can do so what I do to start is just do about say three spirals just to start it out and then from there we can add more and I'm trying to do them as flat as possible because I want them to be more like the sort of the surface of the cube the surfaces of the cube some I have three some I have four spirals some you could do two so maybe I'll do another one here just with a couple spirals so just start with you know a little part of an area that you might put kind of inside the cube and maybe I can do five I think five is going to work well so if we start like that we just have a starting of a design and then you can take your cube and just add it on there and then we can build on that so at least you have it started off and so when you go to add more spirals you can add more wire definitely don't worry about you know having the exact amount of wire for inside of the cube so if we just start like that say I just attach it here I could have done more spirals if I want but I don't want it to be too loose either so at some point you want to attach it to the sides a little bit so let's just go with this we started with that and I'm just kind of attaching it and then something that I did that I think is really a good idea is as you do your spiral when you go like back to the side loop it into one of the previous spirals and that's just good of kind of like almost like sewing them together it just makes it a little bit more solid so consider that when you're adding your spirals is just to like even here you know you could say go in on this side maybe into this spiral and just actually maybe not yet maybe we'll just go over and say do another like little spiral and then we could weave it into this one too and you just really have to go with your intuition about what feels right what you think is going to be solid because you don't want any pieces to be super loose but at the same time you don't want it to be kind of too crowded and too bunchy either so as you do more you'll get a sort of a feel for how it goes but you'll see that that's you know pretty solid in there and then if you have to add more wire which you definitely will have to here's a scrap piece that I have that's not super long but I may as well use it up because it doesn't really matter how many times you kind of piece it together so let's just do a little loop here and then do a little loop here two or three times and we can go ahead and add that one to the blocks so we're just keep adding wire until we fill up the area and then even if you have extra wire you can go on to the next side as well so see where I've added this one here let's go ahead and loop it into one of the previous spirals so it's quite solid so we'll just like link it into there so it's going to hold it's shape you know hold that one it'll hold that one in place and we're gonna bring it over here and do a couple of little wind around the sides and around here and then we can go ahead and do another spiral in here and the thing about this wire it's very soft so even once you've done your spirals you can kind of mold them around like it's like sculpting with wire which is really cool and you just improvise just make it up as you go go in there you could even put like I said beads would be nice you can put like little odds and ends buttons you can just really use your imagination with this and let's go ahead and here's an end that we have to finish off so let's just go ahead in here and we'll give it a little a little spiral a little another little loop like there's all kinds of ways you can do it basically you're just trying to like improvise as you go to fill in the empty space and just to make it look a little bit more solid a little bit more decorative so we're gonna bring that one around there and cut the end and then this here for sure we're going to have to add more wire but let's bring that one into there to hold it into place there we go and then we can bring it in here and just do another couple of loops I really like this wire after all at first I was really disappointed I didn't know what to do with it and I ended up giving quite a bit of it away and in some of my little kits and stuff as well and then I realized oh I can actually use this so sometimes you don't want to get rid of all your stuff because we always find a use for it after the fact so see we're still going with the one side this is definitely a project that's a little more time-consuming than some of my other projects but it's it's a really fun exercise it's a fun design it's a cool like kind of home decor type ornament and I think there's a lot that you can do with it and I'm really excited to see what you guys are going to come up with with other ideas because I know especially in the in our group the wire art and jewelry makers club you guys are always coming up with some really really cool ideas so let's go ahead and put this one in here okay I'm just going to attach this one and if if I find that the end is too long it's okay we're going to be able to do something with that after but what I can see that I need to do is loop it actually into this one because this one's a little loose so let's go ahead and loop that one in there and then that way it's going to be nice and solid so if we loop that one in here and just hold this up at the surface of course the the first few sides are easy but it's going to get a little more difficult as you close in the box so the really the hardest part is the last side because you can't like stick your hand underneath like that but you'll see once you get to the last side you'll be so practiced at this that you'll be able to figure out how to do it so don't worry too much about that and just figure it out as you go and I'll just finish up the one side and then I'll finish the rest off camera and show you the finished result because otherwise this would make for a very long video so we're just going to wind this around here and then like you can see this is done like for that side and then this one will go and do the other side after but let's just finish off this one side we're going to bring it in here and this one even too you can loop it into this one you could loop it into the bigger one because we really do want it to be as solid as possible bring it around and even you could loop it into two of them so we looped it into that one and this one and we're just really connecting all the loops together which is really great and then let me bring it back up through the cube and give it another couple loop de loops and you'll see once the whole cube is done if there are little imperfections you're definitely not going to see them so don't worry too much if you have a little gap or a little area that's you know you don't consider to be perfect it's certainly not a problem at all and you can always put put the side you like least flat on the table so it doesn't even show so there we go so this too we could leave it and continue on that side and then we'll just keep going with our sides so I ended up doing five sides and leaving it open and I did a little lid so now I'm going to attach the lid and for that I'm going to get a scrap of my 18 gauge wire and I'm going to just make a little jump ring so we're just going to twist it around and cut the edge just give it a little flush cut here and flip it and do the other side and then we're going to open it up it doesn't have to be too big maybe six seven millimeters and then what we want to do is find its strategic spot to attach it so where the one edge is like sticking up a little higher we can take the jump ring and just stick it through here and then through here for the lid I ended up doing like the little loops but I could have also not done those little loops in the corners as well so we're just going to put one jump ring and close it up and then we'll put the other one on the other corner and this is a really fun idea to make like a little treasure box it's more decorative than anything because it's not really practical to actually keep things in but maybe you could fill it up with crystals or something like that could be really cool so we're just going to get this in and if you find it hard to access the jump ring to close it you can get another pair of pliers preferably a flat pair but I only have the round pair nearby so we're going to close that up and so then it loosely holds the lid on the box and you can open and close it so thanks so much for watching the video give it a big thumbs up if you liked it be sure to subscribe to my channel for lots more DIY wire art and jewelry making videos hit the notification bell to be notified when I go live and when I post new videos and if you'd like to share photos of your creations be sure to join the wire art and jewelry makers club on Facebook and if you'd like to check out my work on Etsy my husband and I specialize in custom wire wedding cake toppers and funky jewelry and I also have a mailing list so if you'd like to join the mailing list I'll send you my free ebook wire art essentials you can sign up for that below so thanks for watching and we'll see you the next time