The creation and demise of a garden snail.

You know how when you're creating something for the home or garden and you have this image in your head of what it will look like once it's finished? Well I recently decided to make a garden sculpture and I wanted to make this sculpture out of some old copper pipe I had so I scoured the tinterweb for inspiration and I settled on a snail, yes a snail! You see, the ones I found in my searches looked pretty easy to replicate - oh how naive am I!
Basically this is what I had in my mind and this is what I was going to produce

http://www.hawcreekforge.com/

Cute huh!

Unfortunately this is what I actually created bodged together.

So how did I make this masterpiece? Well the copper pipe speaks for itself but for the eyes I needed wire and the only wire I could find was thick gauge fencing wiring and there is no way on fullers earth I could bend it so I delved into Mr TG's shed to see what I could find - solder wire! I used the solder wire to wrap around a glass marble for the actual eye but my inspiration didn't end there, no no, I was on a roll. I used curtain rings to attach the eyes to but then couldn't figure out how to attach the actual wire to the wooden ring - ping! I'll wrap thin garden wire around it - it'll make the wire look like eyelashes - won't it!
Somehow I managed to attach the whole eye thing to the copper body and voila!
OK I can hear your laughing you know and yes I nearly wet myself too when I looked at it - why I even kept going after 10 minutes is beyond me.
Anyway the next morning I went to see what could be salvaged - I even went out with a blow torch to solder the ruddy thing together - however it seems the snail had suffered a malady in the night and it would also seem that solder wire is not stiff enough to be of any use to man nor beast - the snail had all but curled up and died!
Least I learned one thing - I am never working with copper and wire ever again!