I tried the wires, and went back to paper tags. Use a pencil, it does not fade, I only have 2 or 3 tags a year that I can't read. The reason I didn't like the wires was I couldn't tell what the cross was when I was harvesting the seed, then I had to sit down with my wire log and sort everything out. When I harvest using tags I can write the cross on the envelope and I'm skipping a step. The other thing I didn't find any fun was straightening out and sorting all the wires so I could use them again. The plastic bread bag tags are nice but, I cliped off a couple of blooms trying to put them on, they do not work well on some scapes when the buds are close together.

I have used colored wires, paper clips, yarn, masking tape and preferred the paper tags until a couple of years ago when I had a bad infestation of snails. The snails liked the paper tags and would eat the outside layers off, destroying the cross information. So I went to the plastic bread type tags.

The plastic tags are difficult to use sometimes. Wind sometimes blows them off and I have to use string sometimes to tie them on when blooms are too close together or too large. But I like to put the cross and date information on the tag, which only the tags (paper or plastic) will provide. The tags are also much more visible, so I don't lose as many pods.
Ed