Painted Glass Garden Mushrooms

I’ve been seeing these really adorable glass mushrooms everywhere. I don’t have a picture to show you, but I’ve seen them at specialty garden stores and craft fairs. They are colorful but small, and whenever I’ve seen them they’re usually grouped together with at least ten or twenty of them. The only problem? They are expensive. A small one will run anywhere from $8-12. So to put ten or twenty of them in a group somewhere in the garden? A little too pricey for me.

I’ve been playing around with making my own, and while I could probably sculpt them out of clay or even pour some out of concrete, I decided to see if I could reuse some old glass pieces and make them that way. (Cuz I’m addicted to gluing glass together. Ya know?)

I found some old dessert cups and small bowls at Goodwill for 50 cents each. Then I spotted this Martha Stewart paint on sale at Michaels for just 99 cents a bottle. So I bought a couple colors.

I squirted some paint inside of the cups, and put on a healthy coat.

Then I did the same with the inside of the bowl.

On the outside of the bowl, I painted some spots…

… and a little green edge.

When both pieces were dry, I turned the dessert glass upside down and added glue to it. (The same kind I use for the glass garden sculptures.)

Then I secured the bowl to the dessert glass.

The finished product was pretty cute. So I decided to experiment with some other colors and dessert cups.

I did some blue sparkly paint with green on another one, and added the green glass beads that I had left over from the other garden sculpture I made a couple weeks ago. I also painted an orange one and used a bit of sparkly paint to jazz it up.

Once I put them in the garden, I really liked them. Since I have a lot of green but not a lot of flowers (on a count of my clueless-ness at growing things) they add some nice color. They’re cheap enough to make so I might do a few more and experiment.

Want more projects like this? You can find them in my book, Glass Sculptures: How to Make Beautiful Sculptures for the Garden Using Vases, Bowls, and Other Glass Pieces.