Step One
First of all, we have to create a pattern, 4px wide, and 1px high, so go file–new and make a 4px*1px canvas, with a transparent background (check box at the bottom)- then using the pencil tool, make 2 dots on the left or right of the canvas, as shown to the left. Now, press ctrl + a to select all of the canvas, then go edit–define pattern and name it whatever you wish. You can now close this image, we are finished with it.
Step Two
Next, create a new canvas - this one about 250px wide, and 100px high, fill the background black, and then on a new later, select the paint bucket tool and then use the settings shown below so that we can fill in a pattern, instead of a color - as shown, choose our new pattern that we defined in step 1.
Your image should now look like that to the left (not that due to the .gif quality, the image to the left may look slightly different to yours - don’t worry). 
Step Three
Select the gradient tool by pressing the paint bucket until the box pops out with the gradient fill option, or press G - now select the gradient ringed to the left (it is a built in Adobe gradient fill, perfect for our purposes).
Now make a new selection, this one about 40px high, and 250px (all the canvas) high, on a new layer, and fill it with this gradient, as shown below.
Step Four
Looks pretty awful eh? Lets change that blending mode to multiply (on the layer with the gradient on). Now duplicate the gradient layer (layer–duplicate layer) and then change the fill opacity of the new layer to 50%, as shown to the left.
Your image should now look like that shown below.
Step Five
Our next step is to bend the wire, to do that first we blend the 2 gradient layers, by selecting the top one (second gradient on my layers palette) and pressing ctrl+e - now with that layer selected we go filter–distort–wave and enter the following settings:
Wave
Number of generators: 5
Wavelength: min = 10, max = 425
Amplitude: min=5, max=20
Scale: vertical=100%, horizontal=100%
Type: Sine
Undefined Areas: Repeat Edge Pixels
Note that you can experiment with these settings depending on how wild you want your wire to be.
Your image should now look like that below.
Step Six
Next, make a selection of the gradient layer, by holding ctrl, then clicking on the layer with a gradient on (either one), now press ctrl+shift+i then select the layer with the pattern on, and press delete - you should now have something like that shown to the left.
Step Seven
This is the end result I came up with (left).
To change the colors of an image, see my Re-colouring an image tutorial. To make the bottom wire have a different opacity, I selected the selection of the pattern layer, feathered it by 1px, inversed the selection and deleted the inverse.
