Another delight that we found in her garden was glass flowers on rebar, which she and her husband Tom made themselves with thrift store glass and ceramic plates. She had quite a few! Peter commented about how hard it is to make those thrift store flowers, because of having to drill through them. But Linda had come up with an alternative to drilling, which was to glue a bud vase to the back of the flower, and simply slip it over a slightly bent piece of rebar.
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| One of Linda's glass flowers |
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| Another of Linda's flowers, with a blue bottle accent |
Inspired by Linda's tip on making these flowers easier, I decided to make some of my own. OK, one of my own. It's a challenge to find just the right glass and/or ceramic plates and dishes at the thrift store. I started collecting them just a few weeks after our visit to Linda's garden, and now that winter is here, I decided to pull them out and stick them together to make a big gaudy flower for my new front garden.
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| Since orange and red are going to be signature colors in the front garden, that's what I looked for. |
I did buy a couple of other elements as possibilities, but these were the best, I thought. The first step was to rough up all the surfaces that were going to be glued together, using sandpaper, as directed in the packaging for the E6000 waterproof glue that I was using.
I've used waterproof glues before in the past, but this one was new to me. It was definitely more goopy/runny than others I've used, and tended to leave strings, rather like a glue gun.
But after 24 hours of bonding, it seems to be holding and drying just fine.
Since there were four pieces that needed to be stuck together, I decided to do them two at a time, leaving them 24 hours between to dry. Then I stuck each pair of items together. After another 24 hours of drying, I attached the vase to the back, after roughing up the surface.
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| Back of the last plate and the bud vase waiting to be glued together. |
In December when Chris was here working on my front garden, I asked him to bend two pieces of rebar for me to use for these flowers. I won't put this one out until later in the spring, and I'm going to take it in each winter. Linda brings hers in and stores them, after giving them a good wash. Read a post here about that.
By the time spring arrives I might have acquired the makings for another one. I think two is enough, don't you?