Monday, January 3, 2011

Christmas gifts - glass blocks

For Christmas this year Bob and I decided to make some gifts for our daughters. We got this idea last year while visiting a friend's house at Christmas time. You start with a glass block; we bought 4 of them, intending to keep one for ourselves. Each of the blocks had a different pattern embedded in the glass. Bob drilled a hole through the glass block and then fished clear christmas lights through the hole and into the block. If I remember correctly there are about 70 lights in each of the blocks. We had purchased lights that contained 35 lights on a string, but found that one string in each block wasn't bright enough. Bob was able to splice 2 strings together for each of the blocks. The pictures below show 2 of the 4 blocks with the lights plugged in.















Here are 3 of the 4 finished projects. I forgot to take a picture of the first one that we completed. We took it with us on a trip to Florida in November so that we could give it to our oldest daughter who lives in south Florida. I certainly wasn't going to package it up and ship it to her. I don't know if it would have arrived in one piece and have no idea how much it would have cost to ship.
I wrapped ribbon around the block and then created bows to make the glass blocks look like Christmas gifts. Then I added some decorative curly sticks and fancy wires behind the bow. They look great when plugged in and lit. We gave these 3 to our other 2 daughters and to the oldest granddaughter.
We decided to give all of them away. If we want one for ourselves, we'll just make another one!

1 comment:

Rena Sawatski said...

Wow, Chrissy these are gorgeous. What a wonderful unique idea for a pressie.