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Garden Treasure Bird Pool

Welcome to new followers and thank you for all your lovely comments about my Pool of Dreams bird bath. I must admit I was a bit overwhelmed but feel privileged to have been featured on Discover .

I have made another bird pool. This one is a lot smaller and constructed by using my other method by casting the cement mortar into a mould which in this case was a plastic melamine salad bowl from Tescos! “You can’t use that” my daughter insisted, “it’s too nice, you’ll get it covered in concrete and we could use it to eat salad out of!” So I had to sneak it into my shed while she was at college and I covered the inside quickly with wire, mesh and cement mortar.

Again I began from the centre with a beautiful ammonite.

I didn’t like the horizontal direction of the first few strips of gold metal leaf glass, so I redid it …

Old toothbrushes are great for cleaning out that stubborn grout!

Garden Treasure Bird Pool

I love using glass marbles in these pieces combined with glass nuggets and milliefiori tiles. The marbles were bought years ago on a trip with my kids to the House of Marbles in Devon. Many years ago we watched the marbles being made in the factory, which was fascinating. I think even my hyperactive boys were mesmerized and settled down for five minutes to watch. We all bought a tub of marbles each and when we got them home they were played with for a short while before being left to collect dust on shelves in the bedroom. When my kids left home and cleared their rooms they gave me their marbles and I stored several jars of them in my work-shed with the idea that I would use them one day. It wasn’t until I discovered I could cut them into two halves (not an easy cut, and not 100% accurate or successful) that I began to use them in my work. That way I had a flat base to stick them into the cement adhesive.

Garden Treasure Bird Pool and the Pool of Dreams.

Hand cast wire and concrete bowl, glass tile, vintage glass tiles from Marble Mosaic Company, glass nuggets and marbles, hand gilded metal leaf glass, milliefiori, ceramic tiles, fossils from madagascar and the Jurassic coast, gold lipped oyster shell from Boris Anrep’s studio)

Happy May Day!

Want to learn how to make a bird bath ?  I have a course coming up on 4th and 5th September 2021 ….

See HERE

 

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14 Comments

  1. I have to say, I love the ammonite centre in the Garden Treasure Bird Pool. Although the Pool of Dreams is more colourful, this one has a really earthy feel to it. Fantastic!

  2. Love, love, LOVE this!!! The combination of materials and textures makes it so fun to look at — again and again. Luck birds. Do you do workshops?

  3. Kate, can you offer any tips for clean cuts when working with gold glass mosaic? Do you cut with Leponitts or Montolitts? Do you use a grinder or sandpaper to neaten the cut edge?
    Thanks.

    1. Hi Tracey, I use Leponits, haven’t tried the others. I never use grinders or sandpaper for gold mosaic smalti. Sometimes I use hammer and hardie and especially to chip the bottom edges off when they are protruding beyond the top and would get in the way of the next piece of mosaic to be laid. But the top can be fragile so I carefully nip the top edge if needed. However the gold glass in the garden Treasure bird pool is my gilded glass so I treat it exactly the same as stained glass and cut strips with a glass cutter and the small rounds with the leponitt mosaic nippers. The rounds can be a little ragged and don’t always cut cleanly but I either nibble the rough bits of glass with the nippers or just use them as they are as sometimes I like the imperfection especially when some of the metal leaf has broken . I think the
      metallic fluctuations add interest..something I’m experimenting with! X

      1. Thanks – that’s really helpful. I get what you mean about the fluctuations when the leaf is slightly broken. The Montolit nippers are very similar to Leponit, but heavier and the wheels are angled inwards. I really like using them. I’m working on a small but special mosaic for a headstone. Its a gold star with a deep blue circular surround. I need it to be quite neat, that’s why I was asking about clean cuts. I’ll put up a picture soon x

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