Bird Baths

So what do you do with a pile of old mismatched dishes and your 4-H club is learning about caring for wild birds......Make up-cycle bird baths of course!

My kids completed 4-H bird baths.

Okay it wasn't like I had a huge pile of dishes laying around and I thought this up all on my own.  It was more of a case of we are learning about caring for "Wild Birds" in 4-H this year and not that the temps are warmer why not do a bird bath.  So after searching my favorite place to find project ideas or better known as Pintrest I saw a bird bath made up of dishes mismatch dishes and thought...LOVE it!

Dishes, vases and figurines to choose from

So where did all the dishes come from....A few family members and Skippy's Flea Market another great business who donated to our club.  When we were all done we had a pile of mismatched dishes, vases, and ceramic figures to use.

Glued together with easy and quick super glue for fast results

We glued them all together with plain old Super Glue some dishwasher safe glass super glue and even Gorilla super glue....It was quite a variety.  Seriously, I tried a ton of different glue in my practice attempts and while some worked great they took way too long to adhere, some even took over 24hours to adhere and we needed a "quick stick" so we could finish our projects in one day.  Quick dry super glue seemed to work the best for that.

Variety of types of dishes made for some fun personalized bird baths

Now not all the dishes were the same design, colors or even even close in shape.  We had small vases, large vases, bowls in varying sizes a even plain old coffee mugs but when they were all assembled they already looked quite fun.

Matching them up with spray paint

Next up was making all the mismatched dishes match and the easiest way to do that is spray paint them.  I know there are tons of "glass" paint out there but again we were looking for quick and easy so spray paint it was.  Mother Nature even provided us with a great sunny 80 degree day so it dried even faster.

If your looking for a fun project to do with a group or just on your own I definitely recommend making these.  They are a quick (other then letting the glue dry for a bit) and very easy project, plus you can make them personal to what you need them for too.  We made bird baths because we were learning about birds but I think this one will be used as a cake/cupcake plate.
However I do want to stress that they are quite fragile.  This is the new version of the unpainted one in the first pictures as it was accidentally dropped and shattered so we took new pieces to make another one.  Think I actually like this one better anyway :)