Inspired by the one we saw at Harlow Carr, I decided a couple of days ago to make a leaf mould roller/container in the shape of a teapot.
For one thing, it’s something to do with the rolls of fencing wire I have somehow acquired over the years, and the chicken wire (I don’t even know where that came from) that’s been stored outside the shed I just took down.
After an entire iteration of this project that, while I won’t call it a failure, didn’t come up to the mark in terms of quality (falls apart at the seams when rolled) or appearance (more of a blob than a globe), I decided to just go right ahead and improve on the design.
Looking at my blobby, wobbly mess of a non-spherical first attempt, I decided that measuring and being careful were maybe worth trying. So I put some marks on my deck and marked the fencing wire lengths at 50cm intervals.
They cross over at the bottom, fed through a loop in one of them. I used some smaller gauge wire to weave a bit at the bottom to keep the wires pointing in roughly the right directions. I also put small loops in the main frame wire at the marked 50cm intervals for some latitudinal circles, which I had to make of the lighter gauge wire, but it is too bendy, really. I think I should have used the heavy stuff. Still, the overall stiffness of this design is better than the first.
I cut the chicken wire into big triangles and bent/twisted it around the wires, or later, itself, in an attempt to make the seams on this one more robust. The first one was rather haphazardly thrown together, and also the leaves we put in it were already wet and compressed, making them heavy and awkward to roll.
We haven’t filled it yet, but hopefully, between drier leaves and a better design, this one will do the job better.
Anyway, it looks super cute.
Edit: It turns out this was properly too flimsy to be functional. A frame of welded rebar and a much sturdier mesh would have been necessary to make it work as a rolling leaf mould processing plant, and that is, for now, above my paygrade. Win some, lose some!