Works For Me Wednesday: Terrarium
Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 8:00AM MAD21 By Alan
It's been a family tradition to spend the weekend around Thanksgiving to fix up the house for the Christmas season. However, weather and family illness slowed us down a bit. There wasn't as much opportunity to do things together.
Luckily, that week, there was a fun little article at one of my favorite web sites, Make Magazine. Someone took an ordinary incandescant lightbulb (now banned in several countries), carefully and safely cracked it open, removed the guts, washed it out, ending up with a perfectly clear little glass vase. There were several projects that derived from that idea, but the one that caught my eye was this lovely terrarium.
So, in an attempt to do a quick little family project, I took my youngest daughter out into the back yard (yes, in the rainy mist), and with some tweezers, we picked small little bits of moss and tiny plants from around the base of a maple tree, and from between the bricks near the garden.
I left her to tend to sorting them out, while I (with some bit of uncharacteristic paranoia), donned some goggles and workgloves to dissect Edison's brainchild. Unlike in the past, modern lightbulbs are not made from frosted glass, and do not maintain a vacuum, so they are slightly less dangerous than they used to be.
However, that doesn't mean that they aren't something to be careful about fooling around with. I had to crack the base between the threaded collar, and extract just enough inner glass to make a clean hole, without jeapordizing the stability of the bulb. Then I washed out the bulb (carefully to avoid any glass bits or dust), and I had a beautifully clear bulb (with the words "75 Watts" on the end).
I found an old piece of plastic that served as a base, and glued it to the bulb, so that it saw at a nice rakish angle.
Then, using a combination of chopstick, tweezers and toothpicks, we assembled the moss into little piles stuck on dirt, and came up with a nice little layout of greenery.
The entire time spent on the project was less than an hour, but the enjoyment I shared with my daughter in assembling it was certainly memerable for a long time to come. We'll just water it a few times a week with a squirt gun.
Every Wednesday, fellow blogger Kristen at We are THAT Family posts clever ideas for getting things done. She calls it, "Works For Me Wednesday" or WFMW. Be sure to go visit her blog to read her post along with links to other blogs who are participating.
Reader Comments (2)
Really cool project. Dad's are sometimes not too involved iin such things.
This made me smile Kristi
That is so cool.