Just another perfect day...: Butterfly Baths

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Butterfly Baths

The original craft that Nebalee wanted to do for our sister craft day was to make Butterfly Baths. She found a cute example on Facebook, and had her heart set on it. Unfortunately, the cost of terracotta pots has skyrocketed and it quickly became cost prohibitive to make these, so we settled on the garden poles.

Jay has taken up a side hustle as a reseller on eBay and spends time every week hitting the garage sale circuit. When I am off on Fridays, I join him. A couple of weeks ago, at one of the garage sales, I found an assortment of terracotta pots for $12, so I scooped them up. They were smaller than the large pots shown in the example, but I was certain we could make them work.

I was so excited to get to do the craft Nebalee originally wanted to do, that I was super impatient and strong-armed her into coming over after Mom and I did our glass class.

The first thing I did was stack the pots different ways, to see how we could make them work. I only had enough of the right sizes to make one stack like the picture, so I declared that stack Nebalee's. Mom and I played around with what was left and decided we could make a double-decker butterfly bath each. While waiting for Nebalee to arrive at my place, we went ahead an painted the backgrounds. That way, when Nebalee joined us, we could jump right in to painting the fun stuff.

Oh, by did we make a mess!

We each ended up with a different shade of blue. Mom had brought down some paints from one of her earlier projects, and I picked up some cheap acrylic from Wally World. The base coats dried just enough that once Nebalee got there, we could get to painting.

We loosely followed the example, but it turns out, we all have different interpretations of what mushrooms and butterflies look like. We spent a couple of hours happily painting away

I didn't have any little terracotta pots for the top of the baths, but for my 50th birthday, Nebalee and our friend wrote out words to describe me on fifty different rocks. I've been holding on to those rocks for the past four years, not knowing what to do with them. I dug them out of the potting shed, and we each chose a few to add to our baths for the butterflies/bees/bugs to stand on and not drown.

Once we were done painting, I broke out my favorite glue of all time, E6000, and we went about gluing all the pieces together. Nebalee had to run, so we quickly took pictures and sent her on her way. Mom and Neballe left their baths with me to finish drying/curing, and for me to seal the next day.

The horses are busy bodies and had to inspect them all.

Chonky Skeeter was just sad it wasn't edible

Nebalee's, Mom's, mine

The next morning, I got up and ran outside to spray the first coat of sealant on them. I picked up by rattle can of sealant, shook it really well, then blasted the top of Nebalee's bath.

Wait ...

The sealant is clear, right?

Why is it spraying white?

Oh, shit!

Yep, I'd sprayed right across the top of Nebalee's beautiful butterfly bath with white primer, not clear sealant.

I was horrified! All of the work that Nebalee put into hers, and with one careless mistake, I'd erased part of it.

Luckily, I still had all of the colors, so when Mom showed up to watch court with me, I fessed up that I'd have to repaint some of Nebalee's bath. After we watched the judge give yet another continuance to the defense attorney, we went outside and started painting. I painted Nebalee's butterfly bath, and Mom painted the trim pieces for Maggie.

I couldn't get the primer off the rocks, so we chose some bright colors that matched the colors on the rest of her bath and I started re-painting. I had to go back to my pictures to see which rocks she had chosen in order to re-write them. I'm so thankful that I was able to biggerfy one of the pictures to read her rocks. Finally, all of the baths got sealed, with sealant this time, and got distributed to their respective homes.