Monday, April 1, 2013

Bird Bath

A long time ago my dear friend, Alaina, over at Recycled Interiors, gave me this vintage, yellow, glass dish and I love it! I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it though...I had it on my kitchen counter for a while but felt like it could have so much more potential somewhere else. It just seemed to be over looked.
For some reason, one day when we were at Goodwill (how most of our stories start out…), I got on this kick about silverware. They had a plastic bin full of knives, spoons, forks..all for like 10 cents each. I just couldn’t get over it and thought, there’s got to be something cool I can do with all this decorative silver. So I bought a bag full of knives and spoons. I left them in the garage for a while not having a clue what I was going to do with all of them and then a creative spark fired off in my brain! I could bend them and make a frame to hold the glass dish for a bird bath!  
I picked out some of the prettier knives...

detail of knife
 ...and bent them all at the same place/angle with a clamp and hammer and the help of my husbands muscles. Definitely wear hearing protection-it got very loud. I measured the circumference of the dish so I would know where to bend my knives so that the dish would fit in snug. 
Bent knives
 Then in the “blade” part of the knife, Ryan drilled a hole in all 6 knives at the same spot. After that we threaded a bolt through them to hold them all together. We had a hollow silver metal pole laying in the garage that already had a female end in it (Ryan used a size bolt that would thread into it). We cut off the pole at about 3.5 feet and I spray painted it black. Then we threaded the bolt with all the knives onto the pole. After that it was ready to be stuck in the ground. 


And here it is finished with the dish - a vintage bird bath! The birds love it, it’s just the right depth for them to get in and it adds a little character to my garden.



Another great example of recycling the materials you have!
and speaking of garden...my tulips are blooming!

Spring is here!

 

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