Glorious Glass Garden

Since I took a crash course in how to attract birds to my garden just recently, I have been searching for interesting ideas to spruce up the decor in my garden and to make it attractive for the critters to come and visit. I am not sure what the birds think of these, but I know that butterflies and hummingbirds will be attracted to these love creations by Glorious Glass Gardens. I love the red one!!!

Barb owner and creator of the glass beauties has been an artist and art teacher for over 20 years, concentrating on painting at the beginning of her career. About 10 years ago, she read about artists who were using ceramic kilns and scrap glass, melting it, and making things out of it. At the time she was teaching both ceramics and the traditional "cold glass" method of stained glass--solder and copper foil.

At first she experimented with terrible results. Then her school sent her to a workshop called "Hot Glass Horizons" in Portland, OR where according to her she learned a LOT! She went back and started teaching almost the entire 2-dimensional design course in just glass, fusing and slumping it. Color, line, texture, shape, value, it could all be done with glass!

One summer, after she had moved to a different neighborhood, she noticed she had a few hummingbirds and got very excited! She set out and bought a traditional hummingbird feeder, one that hangs, but since her garden was nowhere near her tree, it didn't work. Plus, she was dumping a lot of nectar in the hot weather, and the feeder was difficult to clean. This is where an idea was born.

I started to design feeder prototypes that could be moved around and would hold a smaller amount of nectar. The third one was perfect! And that's what I sell today. Then I read about butterfly feeders and made some pieces of glass that were quite shallow for those. Customers began asking if I made bird baths, and I found some molds that would work, make a few more prototypes for them, and that's what I sell now, in two sizes (finches love the smaller one!)I still do traditional stained glass, but I'm always experimenting, I'll never stop!