Homemade Glass, Gold and Copper Birdbath

Homemade Glass, Gold, and Copper Birdbath

This site describes a project to build a decorative birdbath using glass, gold leaf, and copper.

The supporting column is fashioned from 65-feet of gold-leafed glass tubing. The ''bath'' part is made from a wedding cake pan which is gold-leafed and wrapped with teardrop-punched copper.

Twenty-six 0.6" diameter Pyrex glass tubes, each 30-inches long, form the column. One-half of the diameter of each tube is gilded with 23 karat gold leaf. The gilded halves face the inside of the column so when observed the gold is seen through the un-gilded half of the glass. Thus the gilding is not exposed to the weather.

The bowl is made from a 16-inch wedding cake pan. The outside of the pan is double-gilded and then wrapped with copper. This sits atop a 10-inch cake pan with identical double-gilding and punched copper wrapping.

Copper strip is punched with a modified teardrop paper punch, then artificially aged. A few months in the weather will turn the copper a deep brown which will highlight the gold showing through the punched holes.

A window of reinforced tempered glass is affixed to the center of the bowl using underwater sealant.

A light inside of the column shines through the window to illuminate a chunk of glass cullet placed in the bowl. Some of the same light leaks through the thin gold leaf of the column to add a glow from within.

The placement is in a ''garden'' of volcanic rock and glass cullet adjacent to a Koi pond made of glass block. Two homemade walkway lights in the foreground provide interesting lighting at night.

Homemade Glass, Gold, and Copper Birdbath

(C) 2005-2014 Steve J. Noll