Hummingbird Feeder DIY

Hummingbirds, actually all birds, are quite delightful. I’ve never had an interest in birds. I didn’t not like them, I just thought, ‘oh, there’s a bird.’ Now I think ‘THERE’S A BIRD! AWWW…’  Caring about the environment has given me a whole new perspective. It’s quite nice. Most of the time. Anyway, back to the point. Because hummingbirds are so delightful, here is a feeder DIY, so that you can appreciate them and take care of their habitat. NOTE: It may take a couple of weeks for the hummingbird to the nectar and start showing up. Change the nectar once a week.

You will need:

A pop bottle, preferably red but I don’t know if there is such a thing. If you know of one let me know.

14- 20 spoons- again preferably red.  We used spoons from various other places like Cherry Berry, which  has red and pink, and other ice cream or frozen yogurt places. The point of upcycling is to use trash. I’m going to ask that you don’t go out and buy red spoons. Use ones that have already been used. Yeah, it sounds gross, but that is what soap is for.

A red lid- if you don’t have red spoons then get a flimsy red lid like one that are on gas stations to-go cups or even one of those metal peanut jar lids. Not something hard like peanut butter lids.

A candle, not a tea light

Hot glue gun

Pliers

A feeding tube– these you are allowed to buy.

A chain- my aunt had hanging plant pots that she was going to make into a chair pot and she didn’t need the chains any more so we used those. You could probably use any kind of chain.
Hummingbird Nectar

The handles of the spoons.

Wrap the chain around where the lid ring had gone and at the curve of the bottle near the bottom. Connect the two. The feeder tube should be level. Fill it up all the way and it will act as a vacuum to keep it from dripping.

Or this. I don’t know why, but my aunt and I love these. If I had been at home doing these and they did this I probably would have cried with frustration, but my aunt and I just burst out laughing. We’re trying to figure out someway to use them, so if this happens to you, keep them because we may come up with something.

You can also try to do these in a toaster oven. Beware. You have to watch it every second because it takes around 3 minutes or longer depending on what kind of spoons you have and if you look away for one second you could turn around and it will look like this.

And here is the final picture with the feeder tube in it. Not too shabby, right? This was our first one, so it has the unperfect pink flowers and it doesn’t have the red lid either.

This is the first row, plus one on the second.

Step 6- After you put on each spoon reinforce it with hot glue. As a general rule, the stick of the spoon should have melted enough to stick to the bottle when it dries, but it still needs to be reinforced.

Step 5- Place the spoon around the mouth of the bottle in whatever arrangement you want. I made two rows and used about seven spoons on each row. On the back row I staggered the seven spoons between the spaces of the front row.

Step 4- After you have the bowl part bended and rounded as you want it, then cut off the handle about an inch or so away from the bowl. Put it in the fire and get it hot enough that it starts to droop. The heat may burn, so you may want to use pliers. Don’t use gloves because they’ll stick to the plastic.

Step 3- This is what you want your petals to look like. Up until the other day, when my aunt and I were doing our recent version, the pink spoons were giving me a rotten time. The red spoons were always perfect, but the pink ones just wouldn’t do anything but separate or just turn droopy. Miraculously, I managed to get the last set to look similar to the red one. How exactly I did this I don’t know, but I do know that I moved it around a lot more. I had tried this method before, but for some reason it just worked this time. Keep this in mind when your melting spoons. Experiment and if all else fails then try to bend it with pliers.

Step 2- Melt the spoons. For those of you who were here for the flower project or who did the flower project then you know that this seems to be an art. I’ve found that not all plastic spoons melt the same. Don’t hold the spoons in the flame. It’ll give it a burnt look.

Step 1- Take off the little ring that meets with the lid and the bottle wrapper. We got the sticky part off with goo gone, which you can get from lots of places. It’s just an adhesive type remover. Take your red lid and cut a hole in the middle so that it is wide enough to fit over the mouth piece of your bottle. You can cut petals if you want or leave it. Reinforce it with hot glue.

Want more ideas? Check out my DIY page

Plastic Spoon Flowers

So, this is first spoon project that I mentioned not too long ago. I tried this project again and it still didn’t turn out quite the way I wanted, but I think it’s because I’m using thicker spoons and not just because I’m completely incompetent. I still think it’s a good DIY, so I’m going to post it and when I get some different spoons then I’m going to post my results.

Things You Need:

Plastic Spoons

Pliers

Lighter

Candle

You’ll need 17 plastic spoons. If you go dumpster diving for these, some good places to go are fast food places or collect them as you get take out. Now, cut the spoon handles into different lengths. Ten spoons for the longest length and it needs to be a little less than an inch. Five spoons for the second longest length which will be about half as long as the first. Then the remaining two spoons just need to have little stubs.

Now it’s time for the melting. This part is pretty fun, but be careful because the spoons will catch on fire. You’ll want a real candle for this and not a little tea light. Using pliers hold the spoons over the flame. It will only take a couple of seconds for the heat starts to take effect. Watch carefully because the heat may burn a hole in the spoon. Move the spoon around the flame so that the heat is even distributed.

The waves that make the spoon look like a petal should form on their own, but if they don’t you can always help them along with the pliers. The plastic is extremely hot so don’t touch use pliers to mold it. The two shortest spoons need the bowl of the spoon to be a little deeper and the sides should be curved so that the sides of the opposing spoons may almost meet. Glue or melt the bottoms together as shown the picture. Bend back the tips.

Now glue the rest of the spoons, from shortest to longest, onto the bottom of the first two. You’ll want to use a spiraling concept so that each petal goes out just a little more.

For this flower, take the tips of the shortest spoons and curl the tips back, make the bowls of spoons deeper and glue one spoon slightly lower than the middle of the bowl. The four middle surrounding spoons should have even deeper bowls than the first two. You want to have big, deep waves on the ‘petals’. The waves and the deep bowls you can obtain by molding it with the pliers.

Bend the handles so towards the inside of the spoon, so that the handle can be flat against the table. Then glue the four spoons with as little space between them and the first two spoons. Then layer the rest of the spoons in a spiraling manner.

Keep laying the petals until all the spoons are used.

Want more ideas? Check out my DIY page.

Good Morning

There is nothing more life-shattering then being woken up by a screaming alarm clock. I can think of nothing worse than being scared awake. How can it be good for anyone to wake up such a disgruntling way. People should be able to wake up naturally and more peacefully than that. It would make their morning better, their day better and all the sucky things that happen to them over the course of the day would be much less unpleasant.

That’s why I’m glad that I didn’t get woken up by an alarm clock this morning. I seem to have gotten the perfect amount of sleep and I woke up on my own three minutes before my alarm went off. And I feel great. I never feel good in the mornings, and really I never feel quite awake until like 9 at night and then it’s time to go to bed again. It’s all very frustrating.  If I ever wake up on my own it’s like at 4 in the morning and then I get very productive and get all this work done , but then right when it’s time for me to get up then I get super tired and I start to crash. So yes, this morning I feel fabulous and although I do have a statistics test that I’m not feeling too confident about, I’m planning on not letting that ruin my day.

Anyways, I’ve been working on my first project with my plastic spoons and it didn’t go so well. I think I have figured out what I did wrong, so after I gather some more spoons, I guess I’ll try again.

I seem to have the personality for this DIY stuff, if I had the skills to go with it, it would certainly help me out. I have the perseverance to keep repeating the same project when it doesn’t work out the first time, or the second, and I also have the determination to conquer each project no matter how long it takes. When I first started this DIY stuff, it was more of a frustration than anything. If I didn’t get it right the first time, then I would feel like a complete loser and like I should just save myself the trouble and quit, but I still kept working. Determination has always been a compensation for the failureish qualities in me. Quitting has never really been an option. Now it feels like more of a fun challenge to get it right the first time.  And when I don’t succeed, such as this time, it’s frustrating because I want to be able to move on, but I don’t feel like the world will end just because I have to start over. Whether I like it or not, this DIY stuff is pretty good at loosening up my uptight personality.

So yes, this is my post for this morning and I hope you guys have a fabulous morning too!

Crazytown

I have completely given up on trying to learn in statistics class. It’s so chaotic. Everyone is asking questions or trying to answer them and my teacher doesn’t explain things very well. I’ve had a lot of bad math teachers, so fortunately I have been able to adapt and learned to teach myself. What’s sad is I have more blog posts written in this notebook then notes for this class. Anyways, yesterday I went dumpster diving. Twice. The first time I was looking for plastic spoons in Cherry Berry’s outside trash can for a set of projects I’m going to be working on for the next month or so. The main reason I picked Cherry Berry was because they had a trash can right outside their door and it’s pretty small, so I can find what I want pretty easily. I have found that a lot of people use plastic cutlery. It’s annoying that people’s laziness is what is destroying our planet. People waste money to get the gas to then waste more money to buy plasticware, just so they don’t have wash a couple of dishes. Convenience is picked above all else. The cheapest silverware set was a set to serve four people and it was 16 dollars. 100 Great Value plastic spoons were $2.68. If you had four people, you could start saving money in approximately 75 days and you could save your great-grand kids a whole lot more. Bottom line, buy some silverware, it last quite a bit longer.

I can’t force people care, but I can give them the facts and show people what they can do besides throw them away.

The second time I went dumpster diving was in the privacy of my own back yard. Now, it’s possible that what I did crossed the line into crazytown, but that’s okay because I think people who throw away a brand new pair of shoes are crazy too. It takes all kinds of people to make the world go round.

Anyways, our neighbor is moving out. As everyone who has ever moved some time in their life knows, anything that we can spare gets thrown away. So my mom and I wheeled their dumpster to our backyard and started going through it. This is our destination into crazytown. We found a pottery wheel, a brand new pair of shoes, a pair of kid’s shoes, one of fake fancy purse things (I don’t pay attention to fashion, but I know those super expensive brands have replicas that will sell for cheaper), the purse had like 15 cents in it too, a plastic train set, water color paints, some blankets, bottle lids and some boxes. It had other stuff, but those are what I kept. The purse, shoes and blankets will be donated and the pottery wheel I’ll probably take apart or donate.