Scraps Of Brilliance: Altered Bird Cage

Hello fellow crafters! How was your weekend? We seem to have skipped right over spring here and straight into summer, and have been enjoying July-ish temperatures. And that means it's time to start enjoying our deck and yard for the summer, with BBQs with friends, lightsabre and waterballoon fights and long evenings.

And on that note, I have a great little home decor project to brighten up my patio. I always have my eye out for items to alter, and picked up a plain white decorative birdcage that needed some sprucing up. And I'm so happy with how it turned out.

I started by covering everything with a coat of white gesso, then added white crackle paint liberally. Once this was dry, I set to work with my sprays, and added some additional touches of crackle paint after the fact (to prevent the spray reactivating and colorizing this second layer of crackle, I sprayed everything with a sealant first).

The picture below allows you to see all the layers of colour and texture.

I wanted the interior of my cage to look like a secret water garden. I started with a piece of paper from the Timeless Memories collection cut to fit. I used a rock stencil to trace the rockery pattern, and coloured in the negative areas left by the stamp with a plain pencil. To create the pond in the middle I used a sunburst stencil and modeling paste, and followed it with sprays, then created a stream into the pond and out the other side using glass beads.

Microbeads and glass beads create a dripping faucet, while I used Flower Soft for moss. The circular lamp from the Wall Lamp made a perfect well cover.