Garden Crafts - Leaf Shaped Bird Bath

If you love the birds and enjoy crafts, you can make a decorative and unique lightweight cast concrete bird bath for your backyard garden. All you need are a pile of clean sand, a bucket of water, rubber gloves, plastic trash bags, a bag of acrylic concrete patch mix, and a large leaf with decorative veins and ribs. If you'd rather use this sand cast concrete leaf as a bird feeder, it works nicely for that, too.

My sister uses her molded leaf sand cast craft tray as a serving platter for summer barbeques (she lines it with a napkin) ... and my mother keeps the sand-cast leaf I made for her in the house so it won't get dirty. She uses it as her mail basket. A sand cast leaf made from this lightweight craft concrete makes a wonderful mother's day gift or housewarming present.

I made a rustic leaf-embossed bird bath for my garden last summer. It only took me about an hour to mix and colorize the concrete, mold it on the leaf, shape the edges and cover the concrete. The resulting bird bath blends into my garden decor beautifully. The birds and butterflies like the shallow water and broad edges of the leaf shape. It's light enough to lift up and dump, even though it's made from a thin concrete slab.'

Lens photo: large flat garden art leaf design birdbath, sand cast from sunflower leaf. Lee Hansen, aka Pastiche