Good night tonight.  I finally started bending wire!  I actually did quite a bit tonight, but didn't really make a lot of progress.  I began the eve grinding some of the wire, started bending one of the feet, and then realized that my steel plates were too small so I had to replace them with larger ones.  That slowed me down a bit.  It felt really good to start bending though.

I usually only use two sizes of wire: 3/16th for the more structural stuff and 1/8th for the more detailed stuff.  I decided to add some thinner gauge to the mix this time around, since there are going to be so many subtleties and smaller details throughout the body.  I picked up three other thicknesses.  I'm starting with about 50 ten foot lengths of 3/16ths, 50 twelve foot lengths of 1/8th, 20 three ft. lengths of 3/32nds, 25 three foot lengths of .078 and 15 three foot lengths of .055.  It'll be interesting to see what the thinner wire does when I start welding it. 

I was using the 3/16ths tonight to make the point of contact for the front (right) foot, from the toes to the ball of the foot.  It was a lot of tight curves for wire that thick, so I used my torch.  Usually don't get to use it that much because it's really overkill for anything other than just that... tight curves with the thickest wire.  I'm going to try to use as little of the 3/16ths as possible because I want the piece to be more delicate, but one of the challenges I'm going to be facing is that she's standing on her toes, so the whole thing is going to be supported by a pretty small footprint with no internal structure.  I'm going to have to use a fair amount of the thicker wire on her feet just to support the whole thing. I'm definitely going to need the structural integrity of the thicker wire throughout the whole piece, but hopefully I'll be able to ease off of it as I move my way up the body.