Earlier in the season, I had grabbed about a dozen cuttings and bound them together with some strips of plastic bag. Most of these cuttings did not survive, I had about a 25% survival rate. I pulled out the dead ones and left the remain 4-5 bound together. So they remained in the back of my cuttings section, growing out long and getting thick; ignored and passed over.
It was getting time to wire up my latest batch of cuttings. I did a few sketches of some twisty bonsais. Most of these were of pictures on the internet, some were from some resource books I have for just such an occasions. The point of making my own sketches is to try to capture the 'feeling' of movement that was trying to be conveyed. I'm a horrid sketch artist, but making the sketches helped just the same. 
In an earlier post, I posted my basic instructions for growing out ficus cuttings. I like to use 2.5mm aluminum wire, which requires the ficus cutting to be somewhat biggish, about 14-18 inches tall. Ficus retusa is very flexible, but if you wire too early, you can't see the dramatic effects of extreme bending. Maybe that's where I like wiring. My opinion is that extreme bending is beautiful because it's inherently dangerous. There's always the danger of breaking the trunk if bent too much. When the trunk is too green, it's as pliable as a blade of grass - no drama in bending a blade of grass.
I was feeling ambitious, so I went out back and grabbed a full flat of potential bonsai candidates to wire up. A full flat is 25 four inch pots. I included my 'fusion' experiment as well. Did I mention it's HOT? Running about 108-114 during the day. I wait until late night to even set foot outside. I did the wiring inside the house. Of the 25 candidates, only 12 were fully ready for wiring. I took my time with each candidate, trying different funky bendy turns.
I wired my 'fusion' cutting last. I was anxious to remove to plastic strips and examine how they were doing. They were doing just fine! The surviving cuttings had fused into one fat, long cutting. I decided to bend this one into a semi cascade shape, taking advantage of the long spaces between nodes.
I felt inspired by Mr. Fusion, so I built a small wire cage on which I plan to build the roots on. The wire cage is sort of like a tiny inverted tomato cage: it's an armature that comes to a point on the top, then flare out at the bottom. I will be placing Mr. Fusion at the top of the point, then allowing the roots to come down and around the cage.