Easy garden art craft!
After becoming inspired by decorated Bowling Balls (BBs), artist, Sue Gerdes, from South Dakota and a long time member of Flea Market Gardening, developed a simple way to create a brilliantly sparkly bowling ball to decorate her garden. Here’s how she did it:
Sue’s BB Bling and our favorite glue
Preparing the Bowling Ball
- Take a bowling ball and sand it a little.
- Place the sphere on a roll of tape for balance.
- Fill the three holes with plaster, grout or chalk.
Tip: if you have a black ball you should paint black over your grouted or chalked or plastered finger holes so it will match.
What you need:
- GE II silicone clear Premium Waterproof, maybe 3 tubes
- 1 Bowling Ball,
- 1 roll of tape to set the ball on
- Plenty of popsicle sticks
- A plastic bag for catching the stray glass
- 1/2 bag of Celebrate It Decorative Fillers, which is the colored glass.
Sue says, “This glass is sort of small pieces of glass with one side that looks mirrored and is used as a vase filler. . It comes in many colors, green, light purple, silver, aqua and amber and is a new item at Michael’s. It’s going to be popular because there are a lot of projects from flower decorating to glass designing it can be used it for, so I hope they keep it in stock. Our nearest Michael’s is 2 hours away, so I loaded up…just in case!”
It takes a bit of time,…work in stages.
Instructions
- Once the BB is dried, w ith a popsicle stick, I spread a patch of G E II silcone glue onto it the size of your palm and as thick as 1/8 to 1/4 inch. If you glue a larger patch than that it becomes a mess.
- Sprinkle your glass onto the BB thickly, and pat it down into the glue. Let this set for 1 hour and then go onto the next patch.
- Continue this until it’s done, and once it has cured 24 hours, I rub all the extra glass off.
Tip: The glass sticks well as long as you do as instructions say and have glue thick and push them into it. When it’s done, I rub it down with my hand to remove the loose pieces.
The picture doesn’t show how much it shines but yes it is blingalicious
“This took me about 4 days because of drying and curing time, but I sometimes love tedious projects like this. The sparkle is magnificent,” Sue says.
Sue Gerdes’ spiral patterned BB
Right now, Sue is still experiencing rain and snow where she lives in South Dakota. Until Spring arrives there she’ll be working on inside projects like this. We can’t wit to see her Blingalicious Bowling Ball out in the garden! See her Facebook page, Flea2Fab ~~ Sue
Kim’s Blingalicious Blue-tiful BB
Kim says, “Here it is at last! My BBBB …… Blue blingalicious bowling ball it was very easy, mine took 2 tubes of GEII silicone and a whole bag of vase filler. Sue G, I don’t know how you did it with half a bag unless I too much “bling”! ( is there such a thing as too much bling???
Kim was inspired to mae her own from Sue’s design
I placed my ball inside a metal lampshade to give it stability and raise it up a bit. Hope you like it.
It was easy enough to do, I was at Michaels this morning looking at the filler, lol. In my head I was saying ” move away from the bling, just walk away!” I would do one as a gift but one BBBB is enough for my garden.”
Sources:
Ice Rock vase filler
2 Pounds of Mixed Color Acrylic Ice Rock Vase Gems for $8.99
For other colors, search on Amazon for ‘Ice Rock vase filler’
GE II Silicone
GE II silicone clear Premium Waterproof for $4.25
Where to find BBs:
Yard sales, thrift shops
Bowling alleys, ask for old unused ones
Friends, neighbors,..ask around!
3 Comments
I would leave the finger holes unfilled because I’ve found you can mount the BB on a copper rod in the garden to elevate it.
I don’t like to fill the holes in the BB….we had a stump about 3 feet tall…my husband drilled a hole in it and put a piece of
rebar in it and we put the BB on that…everyone asked how we got it to stay on the stump!!!! I love BB’s…
I made 3 of these blinded out bowling balls there beautiful!!! Thanks