Scrap Metal Birdhouse

This is how it looked when I bought it for $1.

A little paint on the underside of the roof and then I started covering the whole thing with pieces of metallic clay. I used gold, antique gold, silver, brass and copper.

All kinds of things got pressed into the clay to give it some texture and make it interesting. I also swapped out that cord for some copper wire to hang it from.

Multiple shades of PearlEx powders make the clay look more like metal and give the whole thing a nice shimmer that is very difficult to see in a picture.

For the edges of the roof I rolled out a bunch of tiny pieces of clay and attached them with a little ball point tool.

The roof needed some more layers and then it needed to be texturized and PearlExed.

The other side.

At this point I was almost done adding clay. At the last minute I decided to do a patchwork around the base but once that was done and after everything was baked and cooled I gave it a wash of acrylic paint to make it look old and tarnished. A few twists of copper wire and one tiny crystal bead finished it off.



Kitty Condo

Like most people who own cats Allan and I went looking around for a scratching post and I was appalled at the high prices and shoddy construction so we decided we could do much better.

We bought some wood, carpet and sisel rope after Allan sketched up what he wanted to build.

We have some really large cats so he gave it a large base with a two story cubby hole and two more shelves above that.

We brought it inside to finish it up and we had more help than we needed. We wrapped the bottom part in carpet and then wrapped the supports in sisel rope. I cut up some old bathmats for extra padding and hung a few toys from the bottom of the shelves.

(The little one next to it is one that my mom bought for $50 and her cat wouldn't even look at it)

We spent less than $50 on supplies and this will last a lot longer than that little one!