Sunday, April 28, 2013

Homemade Garden Flowers

I've been working bit by bit on these glass flowers. We had a speaker at one of our garden club meetings a few months ago who taught us how to make this type of flower out of glassware that we could find at the local thrift shop. It wasn't easy to find glass bowls and such that would stack together and sort of look like a flower! AND ones that were cheap enough for this project. But I kept searching until I had pretty much what I wanted.


The trick to this is to ONLY use a silicone based glue. I used LocTite Plumber/Marine Clear Adhesive. It will stand up to the rain and cold. I also used some paint pens (made to use on glass) to lend some color on the clear pieces. The pink on the left plate is from a paint pen, as are the pink "flowers" on the clear glass insert in the turquoise flower. The orange trim around the smallest flower is also paint. I baked FIMO for the centers of the flowers and glued in wires with beads on the ends for the stamens. You need to look pretty closely to see them in the photo.

I'm not sure how much I like them....I'm not fond of the square one, but was giving up on finding another plate. You can use bone china, porcelain, stoneware or earthenware. If you use terra cotta, you definitely need to move it to the garage or it will crumble and break like terra cotta does in the winter!

I suppose I will just wait and see if someone steals these before I invest any more time and money in this project. I was rather worried about placing these out further toward the street because before we moved here last spring, I set a beautiful new hosta out in a huge pot so that it would be here and ready for me when I returned to plant it. It was Miother's Day weekend and voila! Gone! I really wondered then what we had gotten ourselves into in moving here!! Aside from that little glitch, we are very happy that we downsized. And I'm very happy that I still have some flower beds to play in and that there was room for the most important items that I use for sewing and crafting.



LIFE IS GOOD!!

2 comments:

Sandy said...

UPDATE! Day 5 of these flowers being outside in relatively mild weather and they have become unglued. I can't figure out why this happened since I used the exact glue that was recommended by the person who taught us how to make these. What a waste of time and money. FRUSTRATED!!

Sandy Young said...

I found out that the reason for the flowes to become unglued was that I didn't let the glue cure long enough. I am in the process of regluing and will let them sit for TWO weeks before placing them outdoors again. I DID use the correct glue. The parts that had longer to set did not come unglued.