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.

Mine went in with my "garden in
a box" native flowers.

Nebalee's went into her "garden in a box"
butterfly garden.

We don't know where Mom's will end up yet, but if I'm guessing, it'll be in her rock garden, near her garden pole. But that's just a guess.

Update 8/20/25 from Mom:

Text from Mom this morning.

Nestled in the geraniums for now.

The Ecclectic Me

I like lots of things. Sometimes I even have time to do the things I like. For instance, today I took the Glock out to play. It was frustrating and wonderful

The evil Dot Torture, right handed

Dot Torture, left handed

I did not do so well, but it was a great way to blow through 100 rounds of ammo and get some "me" time on the range.

Then I crashed my niece's birthday party. I hadn't really been invited, but Mom let it slip that she was going to have a faerie garden party and I wanted a faerie garden, so I called Nebalee and invited myself along.

Pre-planning

Laying it out with rocks

Unicorn

Pegasus

I couldn't decide between a faerie forest or a faerie beach, so they got both.

I love Sand Beach Lake - it's one of my all-time favorite destinations, so I built the little faeries their own version of Sand Beach lake. It doesn't look quite this good after the car ride home, but it's still cute. Here's hoping Speed Racer doesn't find it and help himself to, well, everything.

Asset's garden turned out really cute - what a great idea to have a faerie garden party.

It was so much fun, I want a faerie garden party for my birthday too! I'm going to have to plan a "girls' day" very soon.

In which I get all artsy-fartsy

I saw a post on Cowgirl Shepard a few weeks ago of a wine bottle holder made of old stirrups.  I *loved* the idea, but not for wine.  We keep sunscreen and bug spray right outside our front door, just thrown on a chair.  I loved the wine holder idea so much, I thought I'd try it with the sunscreen and bug spray.

I called Mom and Bill to see if they had any old, unused stirrups.  Mom has a whole shed of "someday" tack.  You know, the tack you don't want to get rid of because you might need it someday.  Turns out she didn't have a spare set of stirrups, but Bill did.  Weird, I didn't expect him to be the one with the spare stuff, but I wasn't going to question it.

I took the old stirrups and screwed them to the wall outside of our front door and voila! sunscreen and bug spray holders.  I love them and they make me smile every time I pull up to the house.

Aren't they the cutest?

Close up just in case you couldn't see them properly :)

Now we have what we need within easy reach.  We can step outside, grab what we need, spray up and be on our way.

With all of the work we're doing under the tree with the picnic table and stuff, I thought I'd find another set of stirrups to put on a post there so we could have easy access there, too.  I stuck it in the back of my mind to find a consignment store to pick up another pair of used stirrups cheap.

As with so many of my brilliant ideas, my second set of bug spray holders got changed when I bought new boots.  I'd been dreading buying new boots for a couple of reasons: 1) boots are expensive and 2) I loved my blue Justin Gypsies.  But those boots had finally worn out.  I threatened to get them re-soled, but the insides were falling apart, too.  It was just plain time to suck it up and buy new boots.

Don't get me wrong, I love my new boots.  I do.  Now that I bit the bullet and bought them, they're lovely.  Less obnoxious than my blue ones, but lovely.  When it was time to throw my old boots out, I just couldn't do it.  I physically could not put those boots I've had since before Jay and I met into the trash can.  Instead, I decided to make the bug spray and sunscreen holders out of them.

Well-loved boots

I was surprised at how easy it was to cut these apart.

Jay punched holes for me and I stitched the bottoms shut with leather lacing.

A couple of screws to hold them to the post.

I would be lying if I denied being pretty proud of my artsy-fartsy crafts.  I love this place and told our neighbor L.E. that we were "nesting" and that she wasn't going to get rid of us any time soon.