Bird Feeder Bling

Every now and then you must surrender to your inner craftsperson. I think anyone visiting recent craft fairs and farmers markets has seen bird feeders constructed from found glass objects. I call them Bling Feeders! Most of them are made from old Mason jars which hold the seed and the jar's threads fit poultry feeders that can bought at serveral online retailers, or, if you have a Fleet & Farm nearby you'll find them there.

The images above show my construction using old glass stuff I had left over from my closed studio. The beads were experiments in color I did when learning torch working using Bullseye glass. The large glass shade was found on Ebay. It is supposedly an Art Deco period piece... who knows, I just thought it was cool.

Here is a close up of the beads. It was fun making them just to see what glass does under extreme heat. The color, texture and shape combinations are endless.

Talk about an experience of pure color! I loved the flowing molten glass and its endless potentiality. The vividness of the colors and the translucence of glass have such a sparkle that is only second to gems and polished stone.

A lot of my glass adventures ended in realizing the critical limitation of scale when working with glass. Large scale glass is technically complicated, extremely expensive, and is a team effort.

I just was not satisfied in working in miniature was my conclusion.

Here is another Bling Feeder I did after we moved into our new house in Iowa. This ceiling fixture was too nice to throw away so I added the same type of Mason jar, drilled a hole in the jar for the supporting hardware, and used silicon to glue the jar to the light shade.

The fancy top was a glass base for a candle. It also had to be drilled in order for the hardware to support the whole structure.

Construction of either was fairly easy. If anyone wants info on the process then just put a comment on the blog post and I'll respond the best I can.

In the image below you can see crimps used to secure the bead string to the glass light fixture of the first Bling Feeder shown above.