Small Artificial Christmas Tree = Bonsai practice?

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I bought a cheap, small artificial Christmas tree. It's made mainly of wire and plastic, about 18 inches tall. I can bend the branches in a bunch of directions to make it shaped pretty nifty.

I'm thinking this would be a good opportunity to practice "wiring" without busting an actual tree for now. I know some of it's different, but getting an idea what kind of wiring/shaping looks good and what just looks silly. Anyone ever tried this before? Any pictures or ideas?
 

Wires_Guy_wires

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It's a very limited method, because the tree you have has certain limitations: It doesn't force you to work with what you have, like actual trees would. It also doesn't teach you how to apply wire and how to prune or cut. It doesn't teach you future vision, in the sense that "what's here is here, and you can't let an artificial tree grow for a couple years". It might also give the wrong impression about the pliability of wooden branches.

I honestly would advocate against it, and instead spend about 20 dollars on a couple procumbens or media/pfizer junipers and some cheap alu wire. Modelling can help people for sure! But it's imaginary and very, very hard to compare to real life situations.

Just today I was wiring one of my own junipers and I figured out that the holding strength of my copper wire was completely off. I wasn't able to bend a branch because the area below it was a straight piece of deadwood and the wire wasn't 'grabbing' onto it. The wire went from the bottom of the trunk, in an inch-long straight line towards the branch. So it took me 4 tries before I decided to approach it from the other side and that worked. These are the kind of things that you see in videos, and still screw up in real life because you've just never experienced it. Aaaand then I had to undo all the wiring because I didn't apply raffia and I saw a crack. And then I had to re-apply the raffia because I managed to wrap it without an angle. And then I was able to rewire the branch.
Now with a wire and plastic tree, I wouldn't have had any of those problems. So the design might have been the same, as would the outcome, but the process to get there took maybe 15 extra steps in the real tree.
 
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