Stage 5 - Shadow House - Wiring

I like to make vines to hold my wiring. One it enables me to fix any of the lights without having to tear the whole house apart if something goes wrong and second, for this type of house, it works in well and gives me the vines I would have placed around it anyway.

Another thing, bye the bye, is that I sometimes make fake vines (in that they have no wiring in them) just to fill up spaces were I think a vine needs to be but the wiring doesn't quite work.

The wiring does two things:- one it put light into rooms and I do not always light up every room. Second it allows me to have some sort of lit flowers or seed pods or ? on the outside. There are a huge range of things that can be added to the end of a vine to represent a flower, seed pods, creatures, all sorts of things.

For this house I am only doing lights inside and lit berries.

This image shows two things. First I have used a selection of different size clear plastic tubes to inset the electrical wiring through. Second it shows that I have numbered, top and bottom, each pair of wires. This will make it MUCH easier when it come to wiring them all up to batteries later.

This is the completed clear plastic tubing for the wiring of the Shadow House. I have used one large plastic tube for the main stem of my vine and from there I have added a variety of sizes as the plastic tubing has to have less and less wires go through it. I have taped the connections together with masking tape.

I have now wrapped the entire plastic tubing with fabric (make sure it is a fabric than can be painted - mine is calico) and then wrapped it with garden twine.

This is the finished vine. It has been painted dark brown with smudges of black over it.

Just a note:- If you where to have flashing lights in your model. They NEED to be on their own wiring system or else all lights will flash. 

So you know which of your lights are flashing I would suggest that you use a different colour code of wiring to the non-flashing lights. I have used black for negative and white for positive. If I had flashing lights I could change those wires to say, blue for negative and red for positive or any combination you like as long as when you get to the bundle of wires at the end (and I have 21pairs of wire) you need to know which wires belong to flashing LED's and which ones don't.

Another thing (and I shall be doing this) the lights to go inside the rooms will be white and the lights to go on the outside of the house will be blue. I NEED to know which wires are the white ones. I shall be colouring the tags at the bundle at the end (see right hand side of image above which shows you what a muddle the wires are).